We study the theoretical properties of the fused lasso procedure originally proposed by \cite{tibshirani2005sparsity} in the context of a linear regression model in which the regression coefficient are totally ordered and assumed to be sparse and piecewise constant. Despite its popularity, to the best of our knowledge, estimation error bounds in high-dimensional settings have only been obtained for the simple case in which the design matrix is the identity matrix. We formulate a novel restricted isometry condition on the design matrix that is tailored to the fused lasso estimator and derive estimation bounds for both the constrained version of the fused lasso assuming dense coefficients and for its penalised version. We observe that the estimation error can be dominated by either the lasso or the fused lasso rate, depending on whether the number of non-zero coefficient is larger than the number of piece-wise constant segments. Finally, we devise a post-processing procedure to recover the piecewise-constant pattern of the coefficients. Extensive numerical experiments support our theoretical findings.
In this paper we prove upper and lower bounds on the minimal spherical dispersion. In particular, we see that the inverse $N(\varepsilon,d)$ of the minimal spherical dispersion is, for fixed $\varepsilon>0$, up to logarithmic terms linear in the dimension $d$. We also derive upper and lower bounds on the expected dispersion for points chosen independently and uniformly at random from the Euclidean unit sphere.
As is well known, the stability of the 3-step backward differentiation formula (BDF3) on variable grids for a parabolic problem is analyzed in [Calvo and Grigorieff, \newblock BIT. \textbf{42} (2002) 689--701] under the condition $r_k:=\tau_k/\tau_{k-1}<1.199$, where $r_k$ is the adjacent time-step ratio. In this work, we establish the spectral norm inequality, which can be used to give a upper bound for the inverse matrix. Then the BDF3 scheme is unconditionally stable under a new condition $r_k\leq 1.405$. Meanwhile, we show that the upper bound of the ratio $r_k$ is less than $\sqrt{3}$ for BDF3 scheme. In addition, based on the idea of [Wang and Ruuth, J. Comput. Math. \textbf{26} (2008) 838--855; Chen, Yu, and Zhang, arXiv:2108.02910], we design a weighted and shifted BDF3 (WSBDF3) scheme for solving the parabolic problem. We prove that the WSBDF3 scheme is unconditionally stable under the condition $r_k\leq 1.771$, which is a significant improvement for the maximum time-step ratio. The error estimates are obtained by the stability inequality. Finally, numerical experiments are given to illustrate the theoretical results.
This paper proposes a novel methodology for the online detection of changepoints in the factor structure of large matrix time series. Our approach is based on the well-known fact that, in the presence of a changepoint, a factor model can be rewritten as a model with a larger number of common factors. In turn, this entails that, in the presence of a changepoint, the number of spiked eigenvalues in the second moment matrix of the data increases. Based on this, we propose two families of procedures - one based on the fluctuations of partial sums, and one based on extreme value theory - to monitor whether the first non-spiked eigenvalue diverges after a point in time in the monitoring horizon, thereby indicating the presence of a changepoint. Our procedure is based only on rates; at each point in time, we randomise the estimated eigenvalue, thus obtaining a normally distributed sequence which is $i.i.d.$ with mean zero under the null of no break, whereas it diverges to positive infinity in the presence of a changepoint. We base our monitoring procedures on such sequence. Extensive simulation studies and empirical analysis justify the theory.
Recently, many studies have shed light on the high adaptivity of deep neural network methods in nonparametric regression models, and their superior performance has been established for various function classes. Motivated by this development, we study a deep neural network method to estimate the drift coefficient of a multi-dimensional diffusion process from discrete observations. We derive generalization error bounds for least squares estimates based on deep neural networks and show that they achieve the minimax rate of convergence up to a logarithmic factor when the drift function has a compositional structure.
Matrix valued data has become increasingly prevalent in many applications. Most of the existing clustering methods for this type of data are tailored to the mean model and do not account for the dependence structure of the features, which can be very informative, especially in high-dimensional settings. To extract the information from the dependence structure for clustering, we propose a new latent variable model for the features arranged in matrix form, with some unknown membership matrices representing the clusters for the rows and columns. Under this model, we further propose a class of hierarchical clustering algorithms using the difference of a weighted covariance matrix as the dissimilarity measure. Theoretically, we show that under mild conditions, our algorithm attains clustering consistency in the high-dimensional setting. While this consistency result holds for our algorithm with a broad class of weighted covariance matrices, the conditions for this result depend on the choice of the weight. To investigate how the weight affects the theoretical performance of our algorithm, we establish the minimax lower bound for clustering under our latent variable model. Given these results, we identify the optimal weight in the sense that using this weight guarantees our algorithm to be minimax rate-optimal in terms of the magnitude of some cluster separation metric. The practical implementation of our algorithm with the optimal weight is also discussed. Finally, we conduct simulation studies to evaluate the finite sample performance of our algorithm and apply the method to a genomic dataset.
In a companion study \cite{patterson2020computing2D}, we present a numerical method for simulating 2D viscous flow through an open compliant closed channel, drive by pressure gradient. We consider the highly viscous regime, where fluid dynamics is described by the Stokes equations, and the less viscous regime described by the Navier-Stokes equations. In this study, we extend the method to 3D tubular flow. The problem is formulated in axisymmetric cylindrical coordinates, an approach that is natural for tubular flow simulations and that substantially reduces computational cost. When the elastic tubular walls are stretched or compressed, they exert forces on the fluid. These singular forces introduce unsmoothness into the fluid solution. As in the companion 2D study \cite{patterson2020computing2D}, we extend the immersed interface method to an open tube, and we compute solution to the model equations using the resulting method. Numerical results indicate that this new method preserves sharp jumps in the solution and its derivatives, and converges with second-order accuracy in both space and time.
A fundamental problem in numerical analysis and approximation theory is approximating smooth functions by polynomials. A much harder version under recent consideration is to enforce bounds constraints on the approximating polynomial. In this paper, we consider the problem of approximating functions by polynomials whose Bernstein coefficients with respect to a given degree satisfy such bounds, which implies such bounds on the approximant. We frame the problem as an inequality-constrained optimization problem and give an algorithm for finding the Bernstein coefficients of the exact solution. Additionally, our method can be modified slightly to include equality constraints such as mass preservation. It also extends naturally to multivariate polynomials over a simplex.
The piecewise constant Mumford-Shah (PCMS) model and the Rudin-Osher-Fatemi (ROF) model are two of the most famous variational models in image segmentation and image restoration, respectively. They have ubiquitous applications in image processing. In this paper, we explore the linkage between these two important models. We prove that for two-phase segmentation problem the optimal solution of the PCMS model can be obtained by thresholding the minimizer of the ROF model. This linkage is still valid for multiphase segmentation under mild assumptions. Thus it opens a new segmentation paradigm: image segmentation can be done via image restoration plus thresholding. This new paradigm, which circumvents the innate non-convex property of the PCMS model, therefore improves the segmentation performance in both efficiency (much faster than state-of-the-art methods based on PCMS model, particularly when the phase number is high) and effectiveness (producing segmentation results with better quality) due to the flexibility of the ROF model in tackling degraded images, such as noisy images, blurry images or images with information loss. As a by-product of the new paradigm, we derive a novel segmentation method, coined thresholded-ROF (T-ROF) method, to illustrate the virtue of manipulating image segmentation through image restoration techniques. The convergence of the T-ROF method under certain conditions is proved, and elaborate experimental results and comparisons are presented.
Many problems on signal processing reduce to nonparametric function estimation. We propose a new methodology, piecewise convex fitting (PCF), and give a two-stage adaptive estimate. In the first stage, the number and location of the change points is estimated using strong smoothing. In the second stage, a constrained smoothing spline fit is performed with the smoothing level chosen to minimize the MSE. The imposed constraint is that a single change point occurs in a region about each empirical change point of the first-stage estimate. This constraint is equivalent to requiring that the third derivative of the second-stage estimate has a single sign in a small neighborhood about each first-stage change point. We sketch how PCF may be applied to signal recovery, instantaneous frequency estimation, surface reconstruction, image segmentation, spectral estimation and multivariate adaptive regression.
We propose a new nonlinear embedding -- Piecewise Flat Embedding (PFE) -- for image segmentation. Based on the theory of sparse signal recovery, piecewise flat embedding attempts to recover a piecewise constant image representation with sparse region boundaries and sparse cluster value scattering. The resultant piecewise flat embedding exhibits interesting properties such as suppressing slowly varying signals, and offers an image representation with higher region identifiability which is desirable for image segmentation or high-level semantic analysis tasks. We formulate our embedding as a variant of the Laplacian Eigenmap embedding with an $L_{1,p} (0<p\leq1)$ regularization term to promote sparse solutions. First, we devise a two-stage numerical algorithm based on Bregman iterations to compute $L_{1,1}$-regularized piecewise flat embeddings. We further generalize this algorithm through iterative reweighting to solve the general $L_{1,p}$-regularized problem. To demonstrate its efficacy, we integrate PFE into two existing image segmentation frameworks, segmentation based on clustering and hierarchical segmentation based on contour detection. Experiments on four major benchmark datasets, BSDS500, MSRC, Stanford Background Dataset, and PASCAL Context, show that segmentation algorithms incorporating our embedding achieve significantly improved results.