The gaussoid axioms are conditional independence inference rules which characterize regular Gaussian CI structures over a three-element ground set. It is known that no finite set of inference rules completely describes regular Gaussian CI as the ground set grows. In this article we show that the gaussoid axioms logically imply every inference rule of at most two antecedents which is valid for regular Gaussians over any ground set. The proof is accomplished by exhibiting for each inclusion-minimal gaussoid extension of at most two CI statements a regular Gaussian realization. Moreover we prove that all those gaussoids have rational positive-definite realizations inside every $\varepsilon$-ball around the identity matrix. For the proof we introduce the concept of algebraic Gaussians over arbitrary fields and of positive Gaussians over ordered fields and obtain the same two-antecedental completeness of the gaussoid axioms for algebraic and positive Gaussians over all fields of characteristic zero as a byproduct.
We consider the structure learning problem with all node variables having the same error variance, an assumption known to ensure the identifiability of the causal directed acyclic graph (DAG). We propose an empirical Bayes formulation of the problem that yields a non-decomposable posterior score for DAG models. To facilitate efficient posterior computation, we approximate the posterior probability of each ordering by that of a "best" DAG model, which naturally leads to an order-based Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm. Strong selection consistency for our model is proved under mild high-dimensional conditions, and the mixing behavior of our sampler is theoretically investigated. Further, we propose a new iterative top-down algorithm, which quickly yields an approximate solution to the structure learning problem and can be used to initialize the MCMC sampler. We demonstrate that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art algorithms under various simulation settings, and conclude the paper with a single-cell real-data study illustrating practical advantages of the proposed method.
We consider the well-studied problem of learning intersections of halfspaces under the Gaussian distribution in the challenging \emph{agnostic learning} model. Recent work of Diakonikolas et al. (2021) shows that any Statistical Query (SQ) algorithm for agnostically learning the class of intersections of $k$ halfspaces over $\mathbb{R}^n$ to constant excess error either must make queries of tolerance at most $n^{-\tilde{\Omega}(\sqrt{\log k})}$ or must make $2^{n^{\Omega(1)}}$ queries. We strengthen this result by improving the tolerance requirement to $n^{-\tilde{\Omega}(\log k)}$. This lower bound is essentially best possible since an SQ algorithm of Klivans et al. (2008) agnostically learns this class to any constant excess error using $n^{O(\log k)}$ queries of tolerance $n^{-O(\log k)}$. We prove two variants of our lower bound, each of which combines ingredients from Diakonikolas et al. (2021) with (an extension of) a different earlier approach for agnostic SQ lower bounds for the Boolean setting due to Dachman-Soled et al. (2014). Our approach also yields lower bounds for agnostically SQ learning the class of "convex subspace juntas" (studied by Vempala, 2010) and the class of sets with bounded Gaussian surface area; all of these lower bounds are nearly optimal since they essentially match known upper bounds from Klivans et al. (2008).
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is the workhorse algorithm of deep learning technology. At each step of the training phase, a mini batch of samples is drawn from the training dataset and the weights of the neural network are adjusted according to the performance on this specific subset of examples. The mini-batch sampling procedure introduces a stochastic dynamics to the gradient descent, with a non-trivial state-dependent noise. We characterize the stochasticity of SGD and a recently-introduced variant, \emph{persistent} SGD, in a prototypical neural network model. In the under-parametrized regime, where the final training error is positive, the SGD dynamics reaches a stationary state and we define an effective temperature from the fluctuation-dissipation theorem, computed from dynamical mean-field theory. We use the effective temperature to quantify the magnitude of the SGD noise as a function of the problem parameters. In the over-parametrized regime, where the training error vanishes, we measure the noise magnitude of SGD by computing the average distance between two replicas of the system with the same initialization and two different realizations of SGD noise. We find that the two noise measures behave similarly as a function of the problem parameters. Moreover, we observe that noisier algorithms lead to wider decision boundaries of the corresponding constraint satisfaction problem.
In this paper, we develop local expansions for the ratio of the centered matrix-variate $T$ density to the centered matrix-variate normal density with the same covariances. The approximations are used to derive upper bounds on several probability metrics (such as the total variation and Hellinger distance) between the corresponding induced measures.
Reliable probability estimation is of crucial importance in many real-world applications where there is inherent uncertainty, such as weather forecasting, medical prognosis, or collision avoidance in autonomous vehicles. Probability-estimation models are trained on observed outcomes (e.g. whether it has rained or not, or whether a patient has died or not), because the ground-truth probabilities of the events of interest are typically unknown. The problem is therefore analogous to binary classification, with the important difference that the objective is to estimate probabilities rather than predicting the specific outcome. The goal of this work is to investigate probability estimation from high-dimensional data using deep neural networks. There exist several methods to improve the probabilities generated by these models but they mostly focus on classification problems where the probabilities are related to model uncertainty. In the case of problems with inherent uncertainty, it is challenging to evaluate performance without access to ground-truth probabilities. To address this, we build a synthetic dataset to study and compare different computable metrics. We evaluate existing methods on the synthetic data as well as on three real-world probability estimation tasks, all of which involve inherent uncertainty. We also give a theoretical analysis of a model for high-dimensional probability estimation which reproduces several of the phenomena evinced in our experiments. Finally, we propose a new method for probability estimation using neural networks, which modifies the training process to promote output probabilities that are consistent with empirical probabilities computed from the data. The method outperforms existing approaches on most metrics on the simulated as well as real-world data.
A solution to control for nonresponse bias consists of multiplying the design weights of respondents by the inverse of estimated response probabilities to compensate for the nonrespondents. Maximum likelihood and calibration are two approaches that can be applied to obtain estimated response probabilities. The paper develops asymptotic properties of the resulting estimator when calibration is applied. A logistic regression model for the response probabilities is postulated and missing at random data is supposed. The author shows that the estimators with the response probabilities estimated via calibration are asymptotically equivalent to unbiased estimators and that a gain in efficiency is obtained when estimating the response probabilities via calibration as compared to the estimator with the true response probabilities.
We study ROUND-UFP and ROUND-SAP, two generalizations of the classical BIN PACKING problem that correspond to the unsplittable flow problem on a path (UFP) and the storage allocation problem (SAP), respectively. We are given a path with capacities on its edges and a set of tasks where for each task we are given a demand and a subpath. In ROUND-UFP, the goal is to find a packing of all tasks into a minimum number of copies (rounds) of the given path such that for each copy, the total demand of tasks on any edge does not exceed the capacity of the respective edge. In ROUND-SAP, the tasks are considered to be rectangles and the goal is to find a non-overlapping packing of these rectangles into a minimum number of rounds such that all rectangles lie completely below the capacity profile of the edges. We show that in contrast to BIN PACKING, both the problems do not admit an asymptotic polynomial-time approximation scheme (APTAS), even when all edge capacities are equal. However, for this setting, we obtain asymptotic $(2+\varepsilon)$-approximations for both problems. For the general case, we obtain an $O(\log\log n)$-approximation algorithm and an $O(\log\log\frac{1}{\delta})$-approximation under $(1+\delta)$-resource augmentation for both problems. For the intermediate setting of the no bottleneck assumption (i.e., the maximum task demand is at most the minimum edge capacity), we obtain absolute $12$- and asymptotic $(16+\varepsilon)$-approximation algorithms for ROUND-UFP and ROUND-SAP, respectively.
Person re-identification is being widely used in the forensic, and security and surveillance system, but person re-identification is a challenging task in real life scenario. Hence, in this work, a new feature descriptor model has been proposed using a multilayer framework of Gaussian distribution model on pixel features, which include color moments, color space values and Schmid filter responses. An image of a person usually consists of distinct body regions, usually with differentiable clothing followed by local colors and texture patterns. Thus, the image is evaluated locally by dividing the image into overlapping regions. Each region is further fragmented into a set of local Gaussians on small patches. A global Gaussian encodes, these local Gaussians for each region creating a multi-level structure. Hence, the global picture of a person is described by local level information present in it, which is often ignored. Also, we have analyzed the efficiency of earlier metric learning methods on this descriptor. The performance of the descriptor is evaluated on four public available challenging datasets and the highest accuracy achieved on these datasets are compared with similar state-of-the-arts, which demonstrate the superior performance.
We consider the task of learning the parameters of a {\em single} component of a mixture model, for the case when we are given {\em side information} about that component, we call this the "search problem" in mixture models. We would like to solve this with computational and sample complexity lower than solving the overall original problem, where one learns parameters of all components. Our main contributions are the development of a simple but general model for the notion of side information, and a corresponding simple matrix-based algorithm for solving the search problem in this general setting. We then specialize this model and algorithm to four common scenarios: Gaussian mixture models, LDA topic models, subspace clustering, and mixed linear regression. For each one of these we show that if (and only if) the side information is informative, we obtain parameter estimates with greater accuracy, and also improved computation complexity than existing moment based mixture model algorithms (e.g. tensor methods). We also illustrate several natural ways one can obtain such side information, for specific problem instances. Our experiments on real data sets (NY Times, Yelp, BSDS500) further demonstrate the practicality of our algorithms showing significant improvement in runtime and accuracy.
Discrete random structures are important tools in Bayesian nonparametrics and the resulting models have proven effective in density estimation, clustering, topic modeling and prediction, among others. In this paper, we consider nested processes and study the dependence structures they induce. Dependence ranges between homogeneity, corresponding to full exchangeability, and maximum heterogeneity, corresponding to (unconditional) independence across samples. The popular nested Dirichlet process is shown to degenerate to the fully exchangeable case when there are ties across samples at the observed or latent level. To overcome this drawback, inherent to nesting general discrete random measures, we introduce a novel class of latent nested processes. These are obtained by adding common and group-specific completely random measures and, then, normalising to yield dependent random probability measures. We provide results on the partition distributions induced by latent nested processes, and develop an Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampler for Bayesian inferences. A test for distributional homogeneity across groups is obtained as a by product. The results and their inferential implications are showcased on synthetic and real data.