Classical two-sample permutation tests for equality of distributions have exact size in finite samples, but they fail to control size for testing equality of parameters that summarize each distribution. This paper proposes permutation tests for equality of parameters that are estimated at root-$n$ or slower rates. Our general framework applies to both parametric and nonparametric models, with two samples or one sample split into two subsamples. Our tests have correct size asymptotically while preserving exact size in finite samples when distributions are equal. They have no loss in local-asymptotic power compared to tests that use asymptotic critical values. We propose confidence sets with correct coverage in large samples that also have exact coverage in finite samples if distributions are equal up to a transformation. We apply our theory to four commonly-used hypothesis tests of nonparametric functions evaluated at a point. Lastly, simulations show good finite sample properties, and two empirical examples illustrate our tests in practice.
In this paper, we study learning in probabilistic domains where the learner may receive incorrect labels but can improve the reliability of labels by repeatedly sampling them. In such a setting, one faces the problem of whether the fixed budget for obtaining training examples should rather be used for obtaining all different examples or for improving the label quality of a smaller number of examples by re-sampling their labels. We motivate this problem in an application to compare the strength of poker hands where the training signal depends on the hidden community cards, and then study it in depth in an artificial setting where we insert controlled noise levels into the MNIST database. Our results show that with increasing levels of noise, resampling previous examples becomes increasingly more important than obtaining new examples, as classifier performance deteriorates when the number of incorrect labels is too high. In addition, we propose two different validation strategies; switching from lower to higher validations over the course of training and using chi-square statistics to approximate the confidence in obtained labels.
Although robust learning and local differential privacy are both widely studied fields of research, combining the two settings is just starting to be explored. We consider the problem of estimating a discrete distribution in total variation from $n$ contaminated data batches under a local differential privacy constraint. A fraction $1-\epsilon$ of the batches contain $k$ i.i.d. samples drawn from a discrete distribution $p$ over $d$ elements. To protect the users' privacy, each of the samples is privatized using an $\alpha$-locally differentially private mechanism. The remaining $\epsilon n $ batches are an adversarial contamination. The minimax rate of estimation under contamination alone, with no privacy, is known to be $\epsilon/\sqrt{k}+\sqrt{d/kn}$, up to a $\sqrt{\log(1/\epsilon)}$ factor. Under the privacy constraint alone, the minimax rate of estimation is $\sqrt{d^2/\alpha^2 kn}$. We show that combining the two constraints leads to a minimax estimation rate of $\epsilon\sqrt{d/\alpha^2 k}+\sqrt{d^2/\alpha^2 kn}$ up to a $\sqrt{\log(1/\epsilon)}$ factor, larger than the sum of the two separate rates. We provide a polynomial-time algorithm achieving this bound, as well as a matching information theoretic lower bound.
In this paper we get error bounds for fully discrete approximations of infinite horizon problems via the dynamic programming approach. It is well known that considering a time discretization with a positive step size $h$ an error bound of size $h$ can be proved for the difference between the value function (viscosity solution of the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation corresponding to the infinite horizon) and the value function of the discrete time problem. However, including also a spatial discretization based on elements of size $k$ an error bound of size $O(k/h)$ can be found in the literature for the error between the value functions of the continuous problem and the fully discrete problem. In this paper we revise the error bound of the fully discrete method and prove, under similar assumptions to those of the time discrete case, that the error of the fully discrete case is in fact $O(h+k)$ which gives first order in time and space for the method. This error bound matches the numerical experiments of many papers in the literature in which the behaviour $1/h$ from the bound $O(k/h)$ have not been observed.
This paper introduces a new simulation-based inference procedure to model and sample from multi-dimensional probability distributions given access to i.i.d. samples, circumventing the usual approaches of explicitly modeling the density function or designing Markov chain Monte Carlo. Motivated by the seminal work on distance and isomorphism between metric measure spaces, we propose a new notion called the Reversible Gromov-Monge (RGM) distance and study how RGM can be used to design new transform samplers to perform simulation-based inference. Our RGM sampler can also estimate optimal alignments between two heterogeneous metric measure spaces $(\mathcal{X}, \mu, c_{\mathcal{X}})$ and $(\mathcal{Y}, \nu, c_{\mathcal{Y}})$ from empirical data sets, with estimated maps that approximately push forward one measure $\mu$ to the other $\nu$, and vice versa. Analytic properties of the RGM distance are derived; statistical rate of convergence, representation, and optimization questions regarding the induced sampler are studied. Synthetic and real-world examples showcasing the effectiveness of the RGM sampler are also demonstrated.
Covariance estimation for matrix-valued data has received an increasing interest in applications. Unlike previous works that rely heavily on matrix normal distribution assumption and the requirement of fixed matrix size, we propose a class of distribution-free regularized covariance estimation methods for high-dimensional matrix data under a separability condition and a bandable covariance structure. Under these conditions, the original covariance matrix is decomposed into a Kronecker product of two bandable small covariance matrices representing the variability over row and column directions. We formulate a unified framework for estimating bandable covariance, and introduce an efficient algorithm based on rank one unconstrained Kronecker product approximation. The convergence rates of the proposed estimators are established, and the derived minimax lower bound shows our proposed estimator is rate-optimal under certain divergence regimes of matrix size. We further introduce a class of robust covariance estimators and provide theoretical guarantees to deal with heavy-tailed data. We demonstrate the superior finite-sample performance of our methods using simulations and real applications from a gridded temperature anomalies dataset and a S&P 500 stock data analysis.
We propose a decomposition method for the spectral peaks in an observed frequency spectrum, which is efficiently acquired by utilizing the Fast Fourier Transform. In contrast to the traditional methods of waveform fitting on the spectrum, we optimize the problem from a more robust perspective. We model the peaks in spectrum as pseudo-symmetric functions, where the only constraint is a nonincreasing behavior around a central frequency when the distance increases. Our approach is more robust against arbitrary distortion, interference and noise on the spectrum that may be caused by an observation system. The time complexity of our method is linear, i.e., $O(N)$ per extracted spectral peak. Moreover, the decomposed spectral peaks show a pseudo-orthogonal behavior, where they conform to a power preserving equality.
In this paper, we propose a PAC-Bayesian \textit{a posteriori} parameter selection scheme for adaptive regularized regression in Hilbert scales under general, unknown source conditions. We demonstrate that our approach is adaptive to misspecification, and achieves the optimal learning rate under subgaussian noise. Unlike existing parameter selection schemes, the computational complexity of our approach is independent of sample size. We derive minimax adaptive rates for a new, broad class of Tikhonov-regularized learning problems under general, misspecified source conditions, that notably do not require any conventional a priori assumptions on kernel eigendecay. Using the theory of interpolation, we demonstrate that the spectrum of the Mercer operator can be inferred in the presence of "tight" $L^{\infty}$ embeddings of suitable Hilbert scales. Finally, we prove, that under a $\Delta_2$ condition on the smoothness index functions, our PAC-Bayesian scheme can indeed achieve minimax rates. We discuss applications of our approach to statistical inverse problems and oracle-efficient contextual bandit algorithms.
In the storied Colonel Blotto game, two colonels allocate $a$ and $b$ troops, respectively, to $k$ distinct battlefields. A colonel wins a battle if they assign more troops to that particular battle, and each colonel seeks to maximize their total number of victories. Despite the problem's formulation in 1921, the first polynomial-time algorithm to compute Nash equilibrium (NE) strategies for this game was discovered only quite recently. In 2016, \citep{ahmadinejad_dehghani_hajiaghayi_lucier_mahini_seddighin_2019} formulated a breakthrough algorithm to compute NE strategies for the Colonel Blotto game\footnote{To the best of our knowledge, the algorithm from \citep{ahmadinejad_dehghani_hajiaghayi_lucier_mahini_seddighin_2019} has computational complexity $O(k^{14}\max\{a,b\}^{13})$}, receiving substantial media coverage (e.g. \citep{Insider}, \citep{NSF}, \citep{ScienceDaily}). In this work, we present the first known $\epsilon$-approximation algorithm to compute NE strategies in the two-player Colonel Blotto game in runtime $\widetilde{O}(\epsilon^{-4} k^8 \max\{a,b\}^2)$ for arbitrary settings of these parameters. Moreover, this algorithm computes approximate coarse correlated equilibrium strategies in the multiplayer (continuous and discrete) Colonel Blotto game (when there are $\ell > 2$ colonels) with runtime $\widetilde{O}(\ell \epsilon^{-4} k^8 n^2 + \ell^2 \epsilon^{-2} k^3 n (n+k))$, where $n$ is the maximum troop count. Before this work, no polynomial-time algorithm was known to compute exact or approximate equilibrium (in any sense) strategies for multiplayer Colonel Blotto with arbitrary parameters. Our algorithm computes these approximate equilibria by a novel (to the author's knowledge) sampling technique with which we implicitly perform multiplicative weights update over the exponentially many strategies available to each player.
Let $X^{(n)}$ be an observation sampled from a distribution $P_{\theta}^{(n)}$ with an unknown parameter $\theta,$ $\theta$ being a vector in a Banach space $E$ (most often, a high-dimensional space of dimension $d$). We study the problem of estimation of $f(\theta)$ for a functional $f:E\mapsto {\mathbb R}$ of some smoothness $s>0$ based on an observation $X^{(n)}\sim P_{\theta}^{(n)}.$ Assuming that there exists an estimator $\hat \theta_n=\hat \theta_n(X^{(n)})$ of parameter $\theta$ such that $\sqrt{n}(\hat \theta_n-\theta)$ is sufficiently close in distribution to a mean zero Gaussian random vector in $E,$ we construct a functional $g:E\mapsto {\mathbb R}$ such that $g(\hat \theta_n)$ is an asymptotically normal estimator of $f(\theta)$ with $\sqrt{n}$ rate provided that $s>\frac{1}{1-\alpha}$ and $d\leq n^{\alpha}$ for some $\alpha\in (0,1).$ We also derive general upper bounds on Orlicz norm error rates for estimator $g(\hat \theta)$ depending on smoothness $s,$ dimension $d,$ sample size $n$ and the accuracy of normal approximation of $\sqrt{n}(\hat \theta_n-\theta).$ In particular, this approach yields asymptotically efficient estimators in some high-dimensional exponential models.
There are many important high dimensional function classes that have fast agnostic learning algorithms when strong assumptions on the distribution of examples can be made, such as Gaussianity or uniformity over the domain. But how can one be sufficiently confident that the data indeed satisfies the distributional assumption, so that one can trust in the output quality of the agnostic learning algorithm? We propose a model by which to systematically study the design of tester-learner pairs $(\mathcal{A},\mathcal{T})$, such that if the distribution on examples in the data passes the tester $\mathcal{T}$ then one can safely trust the output of the agnostic learner $\mathcal{A}$ on the data. To demonstrate the power of the model, we apply it to the classical problem of agnostically learning halfspaces under the standard Gaussian distribution and present a tester-learner pair with a combined run-time of $n^{\tilde{O}(1/\epsilon^4)}$. This qualitatively matches that of the best known ordinary agnostic learning algorithms for this task. In contrast, finite sample Gaussian distribution testers do not exist for the $L_1$ and EMD distance measures. A key step in the analysis is a novel characterization of concentration and anti-concentration properties of a distribution whose low-degree moments approximately match those of a Gaussian. We also use tools from polynomial approximation theory. In contrast, we show strong lower bounds on the combined run-times of tester-learner pairs for the problems of agnostically learning convex sets under the Gaussian distribution and for monotone Boolean functions under the uniform distribution over $\{0,1\}^n$. Through these lower bounds we exhibit natural problems where there is a dramatic gap between standard agnostic learning run-time and the run-time of the best tester-learner pair.