Related papers: Empirical risk minimization is optimal for the con…
This manuscript introduces a new optimization framework for machine learning and AI, named {\bf empirical X-risk minimization (EXM)}. X-risk is a term introduced to represent a family of compositional measures or objectives, in which each…
Inspired by regularization techniques in statistics and machine learning, we study complementary composite minimization in the stochastic setting. This problem corresponds to the minimization of the sum of a (weakly) smooth function endowed…
We introduce a new approach for prudent risk evaluation based on stochastic dominance, which will be called the model aggregation (MA) approach. In contrast to the classic worst-case risk (WR) approach, the MA approach produces not only a…
Estimation of convex functions finds broad applications in engineering and science, while convex shape constraint gives rise to numerous challenges in asymptotic performance analysis. This paper is devoted to minimax optimal estimation of…
We consider the problem of nonparametric estimation of a convex regression function $\phi_0$. We study the risk of the least squares estimator (LSE) under the natural squared error loss. We show that the risk is always bounded from above by…
Cross-validation (CV) is one of the most popular tools for assessing and selecting predictive models. However, standard CV suffers from high computational cost when the number of folds is large. Recently, under the empirical risk…
We introduce prox-convex for minimizing $F(x)=g(x)+h(C(x))+s(R(x))$, where $g$ and $h$ are convex, $C$ and $s$ are smooth, and each component of $R$ is convex (possibly nonsmooth). Here $g$ captures general convex objectives and indicator…
We consider the problem of choosing an optimal portfolio, assuming the asset returns have a Gaussian mixture (GM) distribution, with the objective of maximizing expected exponential utility. In this paper we show that this problem is…
We propose a new iteration scheme, the Cauchy-Simplex, to optimize convex problems over the probability simplex $\{w\in\mathbb{R}^n\ |\ \sum_i w_i=1\ \textrm{and}\ w_i\geq0\}$. Specifically, we map the simplex to the positive quadrant of a…
We address a large-scale and nonconvex optimization problem, involving an aggregative term. This term can be interpreted as the sum of the contributions of N agents to some common good, with N large. We investigate a relaxation of this…
The theoretical analysis of spectral clustering mainly focuses on consistency, while there is relatively little research on its generalization performance. In this paper, we study the excess risk bounds of the popular spectral clustering…
Consider convex optimization problems subject to a large number of constraints. We focus on stochastic problems in which the objective takes the form of expected values and the feasible set is the intersection of a large number of convex…
We consider a collection of derivatives that depend on the price of an underlying asset at expiration or maturity. The absence of arbitrage is equivalent to the existence of a risk-neutral probability distribution on the price; in…
Matrix completion has been well studied under the uniform sampling model and the trace-norm regularized methods perform well both theoretically and numerically in such a setting. However, the uniform sampling model is unrealistic for a…
We study estimation of a multivariate function $f:\mathbf{R}^d\to\mathbf{R}$ when the observations are available from the function $Af$, where $A$ is a known linear operator. Both the Gaussian white noise model and density estimation are…
Minimizing a convex, quadratic objective of the form $f_{\mathbf{A},\mathbf{b}}(x) := \frac{1}{2}x^\top \mathbf{A} x - \langle \mathbf{b}, x \rangle$ for $\mathbf{A} \succ 0 $ is a fundamental problem in machine learning and optimization.…
We consider the maximum likelihood estimation of sparse inverse covariance matrices. We demonstrate that current heuristic approaches primarily encourage robustness, instead of the desired sparsity. We give a novel approach that solves the…
Given a collection of feature maps indexed by a set $\mathcal{T}$, we study the performance of empirical risk minimization (ERM) on regression problems with square loss over the union of the linear classes induced by these feature maps.…
In constrained stochastic optimization, one naturally expects that imposing a stricter feasible set does not increase the statistical risk of an estimator defined by projection onto that set. In this paper, we show that this intuition can…
This paper studies convergence properties of multivariate distributions constructed by endowing empirical margins with a copula. This setting includes Latin Hypercube Sampling with dependence, also known as the Iman--Conover method. The…