Road casualties represent an alarming concern for modern societies, especially in poor and developing countries. In the last years, several authors developed sophisticated statistical approaches to help local authorities implement new policies and mitigate the problem. These models are typically developed taking into account a set of socio-economic or demographic variables, such as population density and traffic volumes. However, they usually ignore that the external factors may be suffering from measurement errors, which can severely bias the statistical inference. This paper presents a Bayesian hierarchical model to analyse car crashes occurrences at the network lattice level taking into account measurement error in the spatial covariates. The suggested methodology is exemplified considering all road collisions in the road network of Leeds (UK) from 2011 to 2019. Traffic volumes are approximated at the street segment level using an extensive set of road counts obtained from mobile devices, and the estimates are corrected using a measurement error model. Our results show that omitting measurement error considerably worsens the model's fit and attenuates the effects of imprecise covariates.
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are one of the most popular architectures that are used to solve classification problems accompanied by graphical information. We present a rigorous theoretical understanding of the effects of graph convolutions in multi-layer networks. We study these effects through the node classification problem of a non-linearly separable Gaussian mixture model coupled with a stochastic block model. First, we show that a single graph convolution expands the regime of the distance between the means where multi-layer networks can classify the data by a factor of at least $1/\sqrt[4]{\mathbb{E}{\rm deg}}$, where $\mathbb{E}{\rm deg}$ denotes the expected degree of a node. Second, we show that with a slightly stronger graph density, two graph convolutions improve this factor to at least $1/\sqrt[4]{n}$, where $n$ is the number of nodes in the graph. Finally, we provide both theoretical and empirical insights into the performance of graph convolutions placed in different combinations among the layers of a network, concluding that the performance is mutually similar for all combinations of the placement. We present extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world data that illustrate our results.
Community detection refers to the problem of clustering the nodes of a network into groups. Existing inferential methods for community structure mainly focus on unweighted (binary) networks. Many real-world networks are nonetheless weighted and a common practice is to dichotomize a weighted network to an unweighted one which is known to result in information loss. Literature on hypothesis testing in the latter situation is still missing. In this paper, we study the problem of testing the existence of community structure in weighted networks. Our contributions are threefold: (a). We use the (possibly infinite-dimensional) exponential family to model the weights and derive the sharp information-theoretic limit for the existence of consistent test. Within the limit, any test is inconsistent; and beyond the limit, we propose a useful consistent test. (b). Based on the information-theoretic limits, we provide the first formal way to quantify the loss of information incurred by dichotomizing weighted graphs into unweighted graphs in the context of hypothesis testing. (c). We propose several new and practically useful test statistics. Simulation study show that the proposed tests have good performance. Finally, we apply the proposed tests to an animal social network.
Tokenization is an important text preprocessing step to prepare input tokens for deep language models. WordPiece and BPE are de facto methods employed by important models, such as BERT and GPT. However, the impact of tokenization can be different for morphologically rich languages, such as Turkic languages, where many words can be generated by adding prefixes and suffixes. We compare five tokenizers at different granularity levels, i.e. their outputs vary from smallest pieces of characters to the surface form of words, including a Morphological-level tokenizer. We train these tokenizers and pretrain medium-sized language models using RoBERTa pretraining procedure on the Turkish split of the OSCAR corpus. We then fine-tune our models on six downstream tasks. Our experiments, supported by statistical tests, reveal that Morphological-level tokenizer has challenging performance with de facto tokenizers. Furthermore, we find that increasing the vocabulary size improves the performance of Morphological and Word-level tokenizers more than that of de facto tokenizers. The ratio of the number of vocabulary parameters to the total number of model parameters can be empirically chosen as 20% for de facto tokenizers and 40% for other tokenizers to obtain a reasonable trade-off between model size and performance.
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.
Linear mixed models (LMMs) are instrumental for regression analysis with structured dependence, such as grouped, clustered, or multilevel data. However, selection among the covariates--while accounting for this structured dependence--remains a challenge. We introduce a Bayesian decision analysis for subset selection with LMMs. Using a Mahalanobis loss function that incorporates the structured dependence, we derive optimal linear coefficients for (i) any given subset of variables and (ii) all subsets of variables that satisfy a cardinality constraint. Crucially, these estimates inherit shrinkage or regularization and uncertainty quantification from the underlying Bayesian model, and apply for any well-specified Bayesian LMM. More broadly, our decision analysis strategy deemphasizes the role of a single "best" subset, which is often unstable and limited in its information content, and instead favors a collection of near-optimal subsets. This collection is summarized by key member subsets and variable-specific importance metrics. Customized subset search and out-of-sample approximation algorithms are provided for more scalable computing. These tools are applied to simulated data and a longitudinal physical activity dataset, and demonstrate excellent prediction, estimation, and selection ability.
We consider the space needed to store a searchable partial-sums data structure with constant query time for a static sequence $S$ of $n$ positive integers in $o \left( \frac{\log n}{(\log \log n)^2} \right)$. Arroyuelo and Raman (2022) recently showed that such a structure can fit in $n H_0 (S) + o (n)$ bits. Starting with Ferragina and Venturini's (2007) $n H_k$-compressed representation of strings that supports fast random access, and augmenting it with sublinear data structures reminiscent of those Raman, Raman and Rao (2002) used in their succinct bitvectors, we slightly improve Arroyuelo and Raman's bound to $n H_k (S) + o (n)$ bits for $k \in o \left( \frac{\log n}{(\log \log n)^2} \right)$.
An important challenge in statistical analysis lies in controlling the estimation bias when handling the ever-increasing data size and model complexity. For example, approximate methods are increasingly used to address the analytical and/or computational challenges when implementing standard estimators, but they often lead to inconsistent estimators. So consistent estimators can be difficult to obtain, especially for complex models and/or in settings where the number of parameters diverges with the sample size. We propose a general simulation-based estimation framework that allows to construct consistent and bias corrected estimators for parameters of increasing dimensions. The key advantage of the proposed framework is that it only requires to compute a simple inconsistent estimator multiple times. The resulting Just Identified iNdirect Inference estimator (JINI) enjoys nice properties, including consistency, asymptotic normality, and finite sample bias correction better than alternative methods. We further provide a simple algorithm to construct the JINI in a computationally efficient manner. Therefore, the JINI is especially useful in settings where standard methods may be challenging to apply, for example, in the presence of misclassification and rounding. We consider comprehensive simulation studies and analyze an alcohol consumption data example to illustrate the excellent performance and usefulness of the method.
Bearing fault identification and analysis is an important research area in the field of machinery fault diagnosis. Aiming at the common faults of rolling bearings, we propose a data-driven diagnostic algorithm based on the characteristics of bearing vibrations called multi-size kernel based adaptive convolutional neural network (MSKACNN). Using raw bearing vibration signals as the inputs, MSKACNN provides vibration feature learning and signal classification capabilities to identify and analyze bearing faults. Ball mixing is a ball bearing production quality problem that is difficult to identify using traditional frequency domain analysis methods since it requires high frequency resolutions of the measurement signals and results in a long analyzing time. The proposed MSKACNN is shown to improve the efficiency and accuracy of ball mixing diagnosis. To further demonstrate the effectiveness of MSKACNN in bearing fault identification, a bearing vibration data acquisition system was developed, and vibration signal acquisition was performed on rolling bearings under five different fault conditions including ball mixing. The resulting datasets were used to analyze the performance of our proposed model. To validate the adaptive ability of MSKACNN, fault test data from the Case Western Reserve University Bearing Data Center were also used. Test results show that MSKACNN can identify the different bearing conditions with high accuracy with high generalization ability. We presented an implementation of the MSKACNN as a lightweight module for a real-time bearing fault diagnosis system that is suitable for production.
Convolutional neural networks (CNN) are the dominant deep neural network (DNN) architecture for computer vision. Recently, Transformer and multi-layer perceptron (MLP)-based models, such as Vision Transformer and MLP-Mixer, started to lead new trends as they showed promising results in the ImageNet classification task. In this paper, we conduct empirical studies on these DNN structures and try to understand their respective pros and cons. To ensure a fair comparison, we first develop a unified framework called SPACH which adopts separate modules for spatial and channel processing. Our experiments under the SPACH framework reveal that all structures can achieve competitive performance at a moderate scale. However, they demonstrate distinctive behaviors when the network size scales up. Based on our findings, we propose two hybrid models using convolution and Transformer modules. The resulting Hybrid-MS-S+ model achieves 83.9% top-1 accuracy with 63M parameters and 12.3G FLOPS. It is already on par with the SOTA models with sophisticated designs. The code and models will be made publicly available.
Attention mechanism has been used as an ancillary means to help RNN or CNN. However, the Transformer (Vaswani et al., 2017) recently recorded the state-of-the-art performance in machine translation with a dramatic reduction in training time by solely using attention. Motivated by the Transformer, Directional Self Attention Network (Shen et al., 2017), a fully attention-based sentence encoder, was proposed. It showed good performance with various data by using forward and backward directional information in a sentence. But in their study, not considered at all was the distance between words, an important feature when learning the local dependency to help understand the context of input text. We propose Distance-based Self-Attention Network, which considers the word distance by using a simple distance mask in order to model the local dependency without losing the ability of modeling global dependency which attention has inherent. Our model shows good performance with NLI data, and it records the new state-of-the-art result with SNLI data. Additionally, we show that our model has a strength in long sentences or documents.