Centrality measures are commonly used to analyze graph-structured data; however, the principles of this diverse world of measures are not well understood. Even in the case of tree structures, there is no consensus on which node should be selected as the most central. In this work, we embark on studying centrality measures over trees, specifically, on understanding what is the structure of various centrality rankings in trees. We introduce a property of \emph{rooting trees} that states a measure selects one or two adjacent nodes as the most important and the importance decreases from them in all directions. This property is satisfied by closeness centrality, but violated by PageRank. We show that for all standard centralities that root trees the comparison of adjacent nodes can be inferred by \emph{potential functions} that assess the quality of trees. We use these functions to give fundamental insights on rooting and derive a characterization that explains why some measures root trees. Moreover, we provide a polynomial-time algorithm to compute the root of a graph by using potential functions. Finally, using a family of potential functions, we show that there exist infinitely many ways of rooting trees with desirable properties.
Given its status as a classic problem and its importance to both theoreticians and practitioners, edit distance provides an excellent lens through which to understand how the theoretical analysis of algorithms impacts practical implementations. From an applied perspective, the goals of theoretical analysis are to predict the empirical performance of an algorithm and to serve as a yardstick to design novel algorithms that perform well in practice. In this paper, we systematically survey the types of theoretical analysis techniques that have been applied to edit distance and evaluate the extent to which each one has achieved these two goals. These techniques include traditional worst-case analysis, worst-case analysis parametrized by edit distance or entropy or compressibility, average-case analysis, semi-random models, and advice-based models. We find that the track record is mixed. On one hand, two algorithms widely used in practice have been born out of theoretical analysis and their empirical performance is captured well by theoretical predictions. On the other hand, all the algorithms developed using theoretical analysis as a yardstick since then have not had any practical relevance. We conclude by discussing the remaining open problems and how they can be tackled.
Common tasks encountered in epidemiology, including disease incidence estimation and causal inference, rely on predictive modeling. Constructing a predictive model can be thought of as learning a prediction function, i.e., a function that takes as input covariate data and outputs a predicted value. Many strategies for learning these functions from data are available, from parametric regressions to machine learning algorithms. It can be challenging to choose an approach, as it is impossible to know in advance which one is the most suitable for a particular dataset and prediction task at hand. The super learner (SL) is an algorithm that alleviates concerns over selecting the one "right" strategy while providing the freedom to consider many of them, such as those recommended by collaborators, used in related research, or specified by subject-matter experts. It is an entirely pre-specified and data-adaptive strategy for predictive modeling. To ensure the SL is well-specified for learning the prediction function, the analyst does need to make a few important choices. In this Education Corner article, we provide step-by-step guidelines for making these choices, walking the reader through each of them and providing intuition along the way. In doing so, we aim to empower the analyst to tailor the SL specification to their prediction task, thereby ensuring their SL performs as well as possible. A flowchart provides a concise, easy-to-follow summary of key suggestions and heuristics, based on our accumulated experience, and guided by theory.
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.
Approximate-message passing (AMP) algorithms have become an important element of high-dimensional statistical inference, mostly due to their adaptability and concentration properties, the state evolution (SE) equations. This is demonstrated by the growing number of new iterations proposed for increasingly complex problems, ranging from multi-layer inference to low-rank matrix estimation with elaborate priors. In this paper, we address the following questions: is there a structure underlying all AMP iterations that unifies them in a common framework? Can we use such a structure to give a modular proof of state evolution equations, adaptable to new AMP iterations without reproducing each time the full argument ? We propose an answer to both questions, showing that AMP instances can be generically indexed by an oriented graph. This enables to give a unified interpretation of these iterations, independent from the problem they solve, and a way of composing them arbitrarily. We then show that all AMP iterations indexed by such a graph admit rigorous SE equations, extending the reach of previous proofs, and proving a number of recent heuristic derivations of those equations. Our proof naturally includes non-separable functions and we show how existing refinements, such as spatial coupling or matrix-valued variables, can be combined with our framework.
Data collection and research methodology represents a critical part of the research pipeline. On the one hand, it is important that we collect data in a way that maximises the validity of what we are measuring, which may involve the use of long scales with many items. On the other hand, collecting a large number of items across multiple scales results in participant fatigue, and expensive and time consuming data collection. It is therefore important that we use the available resources optimally. In this work, we consider how a consideration for theory and the associated causal/structural model can help us to streamline data collection procedures by not wasting time collecting data for variables which are not causally critical for subsequent analysis. This not only saves time and enables us to redirect resources to attend to other variables which are more important, but also increases research transparency and the reliability of theory testing. In order to achieve this streamlined data collection, we leverage structural models, and Markov conditional independency structures implicit in these models to identify the substructures which are critical for answering a particular research question. In this work, we review the relevant concepts and present a number of didactic examples with the hope that psychologists can use these techniques to streamline their data collection process without invalidating the subsequent analysis. We provide a number of simulation results to demonstrate the limited analytical impact of this streamlining.
Vector Perturbation Precoding (VPP) can speed up downlink data transmissions in Large and Massive Multi-User MIMO systems but is known to be NP-hard. While there are several algorithms in the literature for VPP under total power constraint, they are not applicable for VPP under per-antenna power constraint. This paper proposes a novel, parallel tree search algorithm for VPP under per-antenna power constraint, called \emph{\textbf{TreeStep}}, to find good quality solutions to the VPP problem with practical computational complexity. We show that our method can provide huge performance gain over simple linear precoding like Regularised Zero Forcing. We evaluate TreeStep for several large MIMO~($16\times16$ and $24\times24$) and massive MIMO~($16\times32$ and $24\times 48$) and demonstrate that TreeStep outperforms the popular polynomial-time VPP algorithm, the Fixed Complexity Sphere Encoder, by achieving the extremely low BER of $10^{-6}$ at a much lower SNR.
This paper reports on a follow-up study of the work reported in Sakai, which explored suitable evaluation measures for ordinal quantification tasks. More specifically, the present study defines and evaluates, in addition to the quantification measures considered earlier, a few variants of an ordinal quantification measure called Root Normalised Order-aware Divergence (RNOD), as well as a measure which we call Divergence based on Kendall's $\tau$ (DNKT). The RNOD variants represent alternative design choices based on the idea of Sakai's Distance-Weighted sum of squares (DW), while DNKT is designed to ensure that the system's estimated distribution over classes is faithful to the target priorities over classes. As this Priority Preserving Property (PPP) of DNKT may be useful in some applications, we also consider combining some of the existing quantification measures with DNKT. Our experiments with eight ordinal quantification data sets suggest that the variants of RNOD do not offer any benefit over the original RNOD at least in terms of system ranking consistency, i.e., robustness of the system ranking to the choice of test data. Of all ordinal quantification measures considered in this study (including Normalised Match Distance, a.k.a. Earth Mover's Distance), RNOD is the most robust measure overall. Hence the design choice of RNOD is a good one from this viewpoint. Also, DNKT is the worst performer in terms of system ranking consistency. Hence, if DNKT seems appropriate for a task, sample size design should take its statistical instability into account.
We recall some of the history of the information-theoretic approach to deriving core results in probability theory and indicate parts of the recent resurgence of interest in this area with current progress along several interesting directions. Then we give a new information-theoretic proof of a finite version of de Finetti's classical representation theorem for finite-valued random variables. We derive an upper bound on the relative entropy between the distribution of the first $k$ in a sequence of $n$ exchangeable random variables, and an appropriate mixture over product distributions. The mixing measure is characterised as the law of the empirical measure of the original sequence, and de Finetti's result is recovered as a corollary. The proof is nicely motivated by the Gibbs conditioning principle in connection with statistical mechanics, and it follows along an appealing sequence of steps. The technical estimates required for these steps are obtained via the use of a collection of combinatorial tools known within information theory as `the method of types.'
Automatic KB completion for commonsense knowledge graphs (e.g., ATOMIC and ConceptNet) poses unique challenges compared to the much studied conventional knowledge bases (e.g., Freebase). Commonsense knowledge graphs use free-form text to represent nodes, resulting in orders of magnitude more nodes compared to conventional KBs (18x more nodes in ATOMIC compared to Freebase (FB15K-237)). Importantly, this implies significantly sparser graph structures - a major challenge for existing KB completion methods that assume densely connected graphs over a relatively smaller set of nodes. In this paper, we present novel KB completion models that can address these challenges by exploiting the structural and semantic context of nodes. Specifically, we investigate two key ideas: (1) learning from local graph structure, using graph convolutional networks and automatic graph densification and (2) transfer learning from pre-trained language models to knowledge graphs for enhanced contextual representation of knowledge. We describe our method to incorporate information from both these sources in a joint model and provide the first empirical results for KB completion on ATOMIC and evaluation with ranking metrics on ConceptNet. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of language model representations in boosting link prediction performance and the advantages of learning from local graph structure (+1.5 points in MRR for ConceptNet) when training on subgraphs for computational efficiency. Further analysis on model predictions shines light on the types of commonsense knowledge that language models capture well.
Recent years have witnessed the enormous success of low-dimensional vector space representations of knowledge graphs to predict missing facts or find erroneous ones. Currently, however, it is not yet well-understood how ontological knowledge, e.g. given as a set of (existential) rules, can be embedded in a principled way. To address this shortcoming, in this paper we introduce a framework based on convex regions, which can faithfully incorporate ontological knowledge into the vector space embedding. Our technical contribution is two-fold. First, we show that some of the most popular existing embedding approaches are not capable of modelling even very simple types of rules. Second, we show that our framework can represent ontologies that are expressed using so-called quasi-chained existential rules in an exact way, such that any set of facts which is induced using that vector space embedding is logically consistent and deductively closed with respect to the input ontology.