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Twenty years ago Breiman (2001) called to our attention a significant cultural division in modeling and data analysis between the stochastic data models and the algorithmic models. Out of his deep concern that the statistical community was…
Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) provide a tool to estimate the uncertainty of a neural network by considering a distribution over weights and sampling different models for each input. In this paper, we propose a method for uncertainty…
Network science provides valuable insights across numerous disciplines including sociology, biology, neuroscience and engineering. A task of major practical importance in these application domains is inferring the network structure from…
Mapping the Internet generally consists in sampling the network from a limited set of sources by using "traceroute"-like probes. This methodology, akin to the merging of different spanning trees to a set of destinations, has been argued to…
Mapping the Internet generally consists in sampling the network from a limited set of sources by using traceroute-like probes. This methodology, akin to the merging of different spanning trees to a set of destination, has been argued to…
To demystify the "black box" property of deep neural networks for natural language processing (NLP), several methods have been proposed to interpret their predictions by measuring the change in prediction probability after erasing each…
Very few K-nearest-neighbor (KNN) ensembles exist, despite the efficacy of this approach in regression, classification, and outlier detection. Those that do exist focus on bagging features, rather than varying k or bagging observations; it…
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures have become the dominant choice for scaling Large Language Models (LLMs), activating only a subset of parameters per token. While MoE architectures are primarily adopted for computational efficiency,…
We propose a framework for the statistical evaluation of variational auto-encoders (VAEs) and test two instances of this framework in the context of modelling images of handwritten digits and a corpus of English text. Our take on evaluation…
Loss tomography has received considerable attention in recent years and a number of estimators based on maximum likelihood (ML) or Bayesian principles have been proposed. Almost all of the estimators are devoted to the tree topology despite…
A theory of neural networks (NNs) built upon collective variables would provide scientists with the tools to better understand the learning process at every stage. In this work, we introduce two such variables, the entropy and the trace of…
We consider the closely related problems of sampling from a distribution known up to a normalizing constant, and estimating said normalizing constant. We show how variational autoencoders (VAEs) can be applied to this task. In their…
Estimated density is often interpreted as indicating how typical a sample is under a model. Yet deep models trained on one dataset can assign higher density to simpler out-of-distribution (OOD) data than to in-distribution test data. We…
Research on probabilistic models of networks now spans a wide variety of fields, including physics, sociology, biology, statistics, and machine learning. These efforts have produced a diverse ecology of models and methods. Despite this…
Machine learning is often viewed as an inherently value-neutral process: statistical tendencies in the training inputs are "simply" used to generalize to new examples. However when models impact social systems such as interactions between…
Tukey depth, aka halfspace depth, has attracted much interest in data analysis, because it is a natural way of measuring the notion of depth relative to a cloud of points or, more generally, to a probability measure. Given an i.i.d. sample,…
Explainable AI (XAI) aims to provide insight into opaque model reasoning to humans and as such is an interdisciplinary field by nature. In this paper, we interviewed 10 practitioners to understand the possible usability of training data…
Even though probabilistic treatments of neural networks have a long history, they have not found widespread use in practice. Sampling approaches are often too slow already for simple networks. The size of the inputs and the depth of typical…
In recent times, neural networks have become a powerful tool for the analysis of complex and abstract data models. However, their introduction intrinsically increases our uncertainty about which features of the analysis are model-related…
Efficient estimation under bias sampling, censoring or truncation is a difficult question which has been partially answered and the usual estimators are not always consistent. Several biased designs are considered for models with variables…