We revisit the divide-and-conquer sequential Monte Carlo (DaC-SMC) algorithm and firmly establish it as a well-founded method by showing that it possesses the same basic properties as conventional sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) algorithms do. In particular, we derive pertinent laws of large numbers, $L^p$ inequalities, and central limit theorems; and we characterize the bias in the normalized estimates produced by the algorithm and argue the absence thereof in the unnormalized ones. We further consider its practical implementation and several interesting variants; obtain expressions for its globally and locally optimal intermediate targets, auxiliary measures, and proposal kernels; and show that, in comparable conditions, DaC-SMC proves more statistically efficient than its direct SMC analogue. We close the paper with a discussion of our results, open questions, and future research directions.
Harnessing distributed computing environments to build scalable inference algorithms for very large data sets is a core challenge across the broad mathematical sciences. Here we provide a theoretical framework to do so along with fully implemented examples of scalable algorithms with performance guarantees. We begin by formalizing the class of statistics which admit straightforward calculation in such environments through independent parallelization. We then show how to use such statistics to approximate arbitrary functional operators, thereby providing practitioners with a generic approximate inference procedure that does not require data to reside entirely in memory. We characterize the $L^2$ approximation properties of our approach, and then use it to treat two canonical examples that arise in large-scale statistical analyses: sample quantile calculation and local polynomial regression. A variety of avenues and extensions remain open for future work.
Given many popular functional forms for the Lorenz curve do not have a closed-form expression for the Gini index and no study has utilized the observed Gini index to estimate parameter(s) associated with the corresponding parametric functional form, a simple method for estimating the Lorenz curve is introduced. It utilizes 3 indicators, namely, the Gini index and the income shares of the bottom and the top in order to calculate the values of parameters associated with the specified functional form which has a closed-form expression for the Gini index. No error minimization technique is required in order to estimate the Lorenz curve. The data on the Gini index and the income shares of 4 countries that have different level of income inequality, economic, sociological, and regional backgrounds from the United Nations University-World Income Inequality Database are used to illustrate how the simple method works. The overall results indicate that the estimated Lorenz curves fit the actual observations practically well. This simple method could be useful in the situation where the availability of data on income distribution is low. However, if more data on income distribution are available, this study shows that the specified functional form could be used to directly estimate the Lorenz curve. Moreover, the estimated values of the Gini index calculated based on the specified functional form are virtually identical to their actual observations.
The goal of this paper is to investigate a control theoretic analysis of linear stochastic iterative algorithm and temporal difference (TD) learning. TD-learning is a linear stochastic iterative algorithm to estimate the value function of a given policy for a Markov decision process, which is one of the most popular and fundamental reinforcement learning algorithms. While there has been a series of successful works in theoretical analysis of TD-learning, it was not until recently that researchers found some guarantees on its statistical efficiency. In this paper, we propose a control theoretic finite-time analysis TD-learning, which exploits standard notions in linear system control communities. Therefore, the proposed work provides additional insights on TD-learning and reinforcement learning with simple concepts and analysis tools in control theory.
Learning complex programs through inductive logic programming (ILP) remains a formidable challenge. Existing higher-order enabled ILP systems show improved accuracy and learning performance, though remain hampered by the limitations of the underlying learning mechanism. Experimental results show that our extension of the versatile Learning From Failures paradigm by higher-order definitions significantly improves learning performance without the burdensome human guidance required by existing systems. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical framework capturing the class of higher-order definitions handled by our extension.
Let $Q_{n}^{r}$ be the graph with vertex set $\{-1,1\}^{n}$ in which two vertices are joined if their Hamming distance is at most $r$. The edge-isoperimetric problem for $Q_{n}^{r}$ is that: For every $(n,r,M)$ such that $1\le r\le n$ and $1\le M\le2^{n}$, determine the minimum edge-boundary size of a subset of vertices of $Q_{n}^{r}$ with a given size $M$. In this paper, we apply two different approaches to prove bounds for this problem. The first approach is a linear programming approach and the second is a probabilistic approach. Our bound derived by the first approach generalizes the tight bound for $M=2^{n-1}$ derived by Kahn, Kalai, and Linial in 1989. Moreover, our bound is also tight for $M=2^{n-2}$ and $r\le\frac{n}{2}-1$. Our bounds derived by the second approach are expressed in terms of the \emph{noise stability}, and they are shown to be asymptotically tight as $n\to\infty$ when $r=2\lfloor\frac{\beta n}{2}\rfloor+1$ and $M=\lfloor\alpha2^{n}\rfloor$ for fixed $\alpha,\beta\in(0,1)$, and is tight up to a factor $2$ when $r=2\lfloor\frac{\beta n}{2}\rfloor$ and $M=\lfloor\alpha2^{n}\rfloor$. In fact, the edge-isoperimetric problem is equivalent to a ball-noise stability problem which is a variant of the traditional (i.i.d.-) noise stability problem. Our results can be interpreted as bounds for the ball-noise stability problem.
Analysis and use of stochastic models represented by a discrete-time Markov Chain require evaluation of performance measures and characterization of its stationary distribution. Analytical solutions are often unavailable when the system states are continuous or mixed. This paper presents a new method for computing the stationary distribution and performance measures for stochastic systems represented by continuous-, or mixed-state Markov chains. We show the asymptotic convergence and provide deterministic non-asymptotic error bounds for our method under the supremum norm. Our finite approximation method is near-optimal among all discrete approximate distributions, including empirical distributions obtained from Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). Numerical experiments validate the accuracy and efficiency of our method and show that it significantly outperforms MCMC based approach.
In many practical settings control decisions must be made under partial/imperfect information about the evolution of a relevant state variable. Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) is a relatively well-developed framework for modeling and analyzing such problems. In this paper we consider the structural estimation of the primitives of a POMDP model based upon the observable history of the process. We analyze the structural properties of POMDP model with random rewards and specify conditions under which the model is identifiable without knowledge of the state dynamics. We consider a soft policy gradient algorithm to compute a maximum likelihood estimator and provide a finite-time characterization of convergence to a stationary point. We illustrate the estimation methodology with an application to optimal equipment replacement. In this context, replacement decisions must be made under partial/imperfect information on the true state (i.e. condition of the equipment). We use synthetic and real data to highlight the robustness of the proposed methodology and characterize the potential for misspecification when partial state observability is ignored.
We give an exact characterization of admissibility in statistical decision problems in terms of Bayes optimality in a so-called nonstandard extension of the original decision problem, as introduced by Duanmu and Roy. Unlike the consideration of improper priors or other generalized notions of Bayes optimalitiy, the nonstandard extension is distinguished, in part, by having priors that can assign "infinitesimal" mass in a sense that can be made rigorous using results from nonstandard analysis. With these additional priors, we find that, informally speaking, a decision procedure $\delta_0$ is admissible in the original statistical decision problem if and only if, in the nonstandard extension of the problem, the nonstandard extension of $\delta_0$ is Bayes optimal among the extensions of standard decision procedures with respect to a nonstandard prior that assigns at least infinitesimal mass to every standard parameter value. We use the above theorem to give further characterizations of admissibility, one related to Blyth's method, one to a condition due to Stein which characterizes admissibility under some regularity assumptions; and finally, a characterization using finitely additive priors in decision problems meeting certain regularity requirements. Our results imply that Blyth's method is a sound and complete method for establishing admissibility. Buoyed by this result, we revisit the univariate two-sample common-mean problem, and show that the Graybill--Deal estimator is admissible among a certain class of unbiased decision procedures.
The Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF) belongs to the class of iterative particle filtering methods and can be used for solving control--to--observable inverse problems. In this context, the EnKF is known as Ensemble Kalman Inversion (EKI). In recent years several continuous limits in the number of iteration and particles have been performed in order to study properties of the method. In particular, a one--dimensional linear stability analysis reveals possible drawbacks in the phase space of moments provided by the continuous limits of the EKI, but observed also in the multi--dimensional setting. In this work we address this issue by introducing a stabilization of the dynamics which leads to a method with globally asymptotically stable solutions. We illustrate the performance of the stabilized version by using test inverse problems from the literature and comparing it with the classical continuous limit formulation of the method.
We develop an approach to risk minimization and stochastic optimization that provides a convex surrogate for variance, allowing near-optimal and computationally efficient trading between approximation and estimation error. Our approach builds off of techniques for distributionally robust optimization and Owen's empirical likelihood, and we provide a number of finite-sample and asymptotic results characterizing the theoretical performance of the estimator. In particular, we show that our procedure comes with certificates of optimality, achieving (in some scenarios) faster rates of convergence than empirical risk minimization by virtue of automatically balancing bias and variance. We give corroborating empirical evidence showing that in practice, the estimator indeed trades between variance and absolute performance on a training sample, improving out-of-sample (test) performance over standard empirical risk minimization for a number of classification problems.