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The emergence of massive graph data sets requires fast mining algorithms. Centrality measures to identify important vertices belong to the most popular analysis methods in graph mining. A measure that is gaining attention is forest…

We study convergence properties of pseudo-marginal Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms (Andrieu and Roberts [Ann. Statist. 37 (2009) 697-725]). We find that the asymptotic variance of the pseudo-marginal algorithm is always at least as…

A fundamental problem in network analysis is clustering the nodes into groups which share a similar connectivity pattern. Existing algorithms for community detection assume the knowledge of the number of clusters or estimate it a priori…

We investigate the use of a certain class of functional inequalities known as weak Poincar\'e inequalities to bound convergence of Markov chains to equilibrium. We show that this enables the straightforward and transparent derivation of…

In this paper, we revisit a well-known distributed projected subgradient algorithm which aims to minimize a sum of cost functions with a common set constraint. In contrast to most of existing results, weight matrices of the time-varying…

The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is an iterative method to maximize the log-likelihood function for parameter estimation. Previous works on the convergence analysis of the EM algorithm have established results on the asymptotic…

Stochastic Block Models (SBMs) are a fundamental tool for community detection in network analysis. But little theoretical work exists on the statistical performance of Bayesian SBMs, especially when the community count is unknown. This…

In this paper a method based on a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm is proposed to compute the probability of a rare event. The conditional distribution of the underlying process given that the rare event occurs has the probability…

Community detection has become an extremely active area of research in recent years, with researchers proposing various new metrics and algorithms to address the problem. Recently, the Weighted Community Clustering (WCC) metric was proposed…

We consider the large sum of DC (Difference of Convex) functions minimization problem which appear in several different areas, especially in stochastic optimization and machine learning. Two DCA (DC Algorithm) based algorithms are proposed:…

Simulation Based Calibration (SBC) is applied to analyse two commonly used, competing Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms for estimating the posterior distribution of a stochastic volatility model. In particular, the bespoke 'off-set…

Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods, also known as particle filters, are simulation-based recursive algorithms for the approximation of the a posteriori probability measures generated by state-space dynamical models. At any given time $t$,…

We explicitly quantify the empirically observed phenomenon that estimation under a stochastic block model (SBM) is hard if the model contains classes that are similar. More precisely, we consider estimation of certain functionals of random…

In many modern applications, difficulty in evaluating the posterior density makes performing even a single MCMC step slow. This difficulty can be caused by intractable likelihood functions, but also appears for routine problems with large…

We consider the problem of fitting variational posterior approximations using stochastic optimization methods. The performance of these approximations depends on (1) how well the variational family matches the true posterior…

This paper contributes to a development of randomized methods for neural networks. The proposed learner model is generated incrementally by stochastic configuration (SC) algorithms, termed as Stochastic Configuration Networks (SCNs). In…

Currently, for crowd counting, the fully supervised methods via density map estimation are the mainstream research directions. However, such methods need location-level annotation of persons in an image, which is time-consuming and…

Stochastic approximation is a foundation for many algorithms found in machine learning and optimization. It is in general slow to converge: the mean square error vanishes as $O(n^{-1})$. A deterministic counterpart known as quasi-stochastic…

In stochastic optimization, the population risk is generally approximated by the empirical risk. However, in the large-scale setting, minimization of the empirical risk may be computationally restrictive. In this paper, we design an…

Stochastic approximation Monte Carlo (SAMC) has recently been proposed by Liang, Liu and Carroll [J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 102 (2007) 305--320] as a general simulation and optimization algorithm. In this paper, we propose to improve its…