Related papers: Sublinear Time Algorithms for Earth Mover's Distan…
The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is a widely used method for maximum likelihood estimation in models with latent variables. For estimating mixtures of Gaussians, its iteration can be viewed as a soft version of the k-means…
Collaborative filtering, a widely-used recommendation technique, predicts a user's preference by aggregating the ratings from similar users. As a result, these measures cannot fully utilize the rating information and are not suitable for…
We consider the problem of allocating samples to a finite set of discrete distributions in order to learn them uniformly well in terms of four common distance measures: $\ell_2^2$, $\ell_1$, $f$-divergence, and separation distance. To…
Markov decision processes model systems subject to nondeterministic and probabilistic uncertainty. A plethora of verification techniques addresses variations of reachability properties, such as: Is there a scheduler resolving the…
We introduce a new class of objectives for optimal transport computations of datasets in high-dimensional Euclidean spaces. The new objectives are parametrized by $\rho \geq 1$, and provide a metric space $\mathcal{R}_{\rho}(\cdot, \cdot)$…
This paper considers an approximate dynamic matrix factor model that accounts for the time series nature of the data by explicitly modelling the time evolution of the factors. We study estimation of the model parameters based on the…
Performing random walks in networks is a fundamental primitive that has found applications in many areas of computer science, including distributed computing. In this paper, we focus on the problem of sampling random walks efficiently in a…
Kernel embeddings of distributions and the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD), the resulting distance between distributions, are useful tools for fully nonparametric two-sample testing and learning on distributions. However, it is rarely that…
This paper considers estimation and inference in semiparametric econometric models. Standard procedures estimate the model based on an independence restriction that induces a minimum distance between a joint cumulative distribution function…
Computing the similarity between two probability distributions is a recurring theme across control. We introduce a unified family of distances between the probability distributions of two random variables that is based on the discrepancy…
Evolutionary models measure the probability of amino acid substitutions occurring over different evolutionary distances. We examine various evolutionary models based on empirically derived amino acid substitution matrices. The models are…
In the context of single-label classification, despite the huge success of deep learning, the commonly used cross-entropy loss function ignores the intricate inter-class relationships that often exist in real-life tasks such as age…
Finding solutions to the classical transportation problem is of great importance, since this optimization problem arises in many engineering and computer science applications. Especially the Earth Mover's Distance is used in a plethora of…
The expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is a well-known iterative method for computing maximum likelihood estimates from incomplete data. Despite its numerous advantages, a main drawback of the EM algorithm is its frequently observed…
In this work, we give a novel general approach for distribution testing. We describe two techniques: our first technique gives sample-optimal testers, while our second technique gives matching sample lower bounds. As a consequence, we…
Reliable probability estimation is of crucial importance in many real-world applications where there is inherent (aleatoric) uncertainty. Probability-estimation models are trained on observed outcomes (e.g. whether it has rained or not, or…
We present a novel distribution-free approach, the data-driven threshold machine (DTM), for a fundamental problem at the core of many learning tasks: choose a threshold for a given pre-specified level that bounds the tail probability of the…
While likelihood-based inference and its variants provide a statistically efficient and widely applicable approach to parametric inference, their application to models involving intractable likelihoods poses challenges. In this work, we…
Electric power distribution systems will encounter fluctuations in supply due to the introduction of renewable sources with high variability in generation capacity. It is therefore necessary to provide algorithms that are capable of…
Moment-based distributionally robust optimization (DRO) provides an optimization framework to integrate statistical information with traditional optimization approaches. Under this framework, one assumes that the underlying joint…