Related papers: Stochastic Approximation and Modern Model-Based De…
Familiar statistical tests and estimates are obtained by the direct observation of cases of interest: a clinical trial of a new drug, for instance, will compare the drug's effects on a relevant set of patients and controls. Sometimes,…
Stochastic modeling of transcription is a classic yet long-standing problem in theoretical biophysics. The lack of unified results and a computationally efficient approach for a general, fine-grained transcription model has confined…
In order to increase the efficiency of the computer simulation of biological molecules, it is very common to impose holonomic constraints on the fastest degrees of freedom; normally bond lengths, but also possibly bond angles. However, as…
We analyze the relative price change of assets starting from basic supply/demand considerations subject to arbitrary motivations. The resulting stochastic differential equation has coefficients that are functions of supply and demand. We…
In probability theory, how to approximate the solution of a stochastic differential equation is an important topic. In Watanabe's classical textbook, by an approximation of the Wiener process, solutions of approximated equations converge to…
This paper addresses the challenge of model uncertainty in quantitative finance, where decisions in portfolio allocation, derivative pricing, and risk management rely on estimating stochastic models from limited data. In practice, the…
Importance Sampling (IS) is a widely used variance reduction technique for enhancing the efficiency of Monte Carlo methods, particularly in rare-event simulation and related applications. Despite its effectiveness, the performance of IS is…
The stochastic volatility model is a popular tool for modeling the volatility of assets. The model is a nonlinear and non-Gaussian state space model, and consequently is difficult to fit. Many approaches, both classical and Bayesian, have…
Q-learning has become an important part of the reinforcement learning toolkit since its introduction in the dissertation of Chris Watkins in the 1980s. The purpose of this paper is in part a tutorial on stochastic approximation and…
This book covers a wide range of problems involving the applications of stochastic processes, stochastic calculus, large deviation theory, group representation theory and quantum statistics to diverse fields in dynamical systems,…
Sampling is an important tool for estimating large, complex sums and integrals over high dimensional spaces. For instance, important sampling has been used as an alternative to exact methods for inference in belief networks. Ideally, we…
We present a quasi-Newton method for unconstrained stochastic optimization. Most existing literature on this topic assumes a setting of stochastic optimization in which a finite sum of component functions is a reasonable approximation of an…
Adaptive therapy is a promising paradigm for treating cancers, that exploits competitive interactions between drug-sensitive and drug-resistant cells, thereby avoiding or delaying treatment failure due to evolution of drug resistance within…
Stochastic diffusion is the noisy and uncertain process through which dynamics like epidemics, or agents like animal species, disperse over a larger area. Understanding these processes is becoming increasingly important as we attempt to…
In response to growing concern about the reliability and reproducibility of published science, researchers have proposed adopting measures of greater statistical stringency, including suggestions to require larger sample sizes and to lower…
Shape-constrained optimization arises in a wide range of problems including distributionally robust optimization (DRO) that has surging popularity in recent years. In the DRO literature, these problems are usually solved via reduction into…
The Markov decision process (MDP) formulation used to model many real-world sequential decision making problems does not efficiently capture the setting where the set of available decisions (actions) at each time step is stochastic.…
Stochastic localization is a pathwise analysis technique originating from convex geometry. This paper explores certain algorithmic aspects of stochastic localization as a computational tool. First, we unify various existing stochastic…
We study contextual stochastic optimization problems, where we leverage rich auxiliary observations (e.g., product characteristics) to improve decision making with uncertain variables (e.g., demand). We show how to train forest decision…
We study a random process with reinforcement, which evolves following the dynamics of a given diffusion process in a bounded domain and is resampled according to its occupation measure when it reaches the boundary. We show that its…