Related papers: Updating Probabilities
The objective of Bayesian inference is often to infer, from data, a probability measure for a random variable that can be used as input for Monte Carlo simulation. When datasets for Bayesian inference are small, a principle challenge is…
We consider the estimation of rare-event probabilities using sample proportions output by naive Monte Carlo or collected data. Unlike using variance reduction techniques, this naive estimator does not have a priori relative efficiency…
When prior information is lacking, the go-to strategy for probabilistic inference is to combine a "default prior" and the likelihood via Bayes's theorem. Objective Bayes, (generalized) fiducial inference, etc. fall under this umbrella. This…
Inference methods are often formulated as variational approximations: these approximations allow easy evaluation of statistics by marginalization or linear response, but these estimates can be inconsistent. We show that by introducing…
Probabilistic encoding introduces Gaussian noise into neural networks, enabling a smooth transition from deterministic to uncertain states and enhancing generalization ability. However, the randomness of Gaussian noise distorts point-based…
We demonstrate that the principle of maximum relative entropy (ME), used judiciously, can ease the specification of priors in model selection problems. The resulting effect is that models that make sharp predictions are disfavoured,…
We study the complexity of satisfiability problems in probabilistic and causal reasoning. Given random variables $X_1, X_2,\ldots$ over finite domains, the basic terms are probabilities of propositional formulas over atomic events $X_i =…
Many real life situations require a set of items to be repeatedly placed in a random sequence. In such circumstances, it is often desirable to test whether such randomization indeed obtains, yet this problem has received very limited…
Accurate prediction of outcomes is crucial for clinical decision-making and personalized patient care. Supervised machine learning algorithms, which are commonly used for outcome prediction in the medical domain, optimize for predictive…
Density Ratio Estimation (DRE) is an important machine learning technique with many downstream applications. We consider the challenge of DRE with missing not at random (MNAR) data. In this setting, we show that using standard DRE methods…
Models that learn spurious correlations from training data often fail when deployed in new environments. While many methods aim to learn invariant representations to address this, they often underperform standard empirical risk minimization…
The deployment of safe and trustworthy machine learning systems, and particularly complex black box neural networks, in real-world applications requires reliable and certified guarantees on their performance. The conformal prediction…
We study the interpretability of conditional probability estimates for binary classification under the agnostic setting or scenario. Under the agnostic setting, conditional probability estimates do not necessarily reflect the true…
Chance-constrained programs (CCPs) provide a powerful modeling framework for decision-making under uncertainty, but their nonconvex feasible regions make them computationally challenging. A widely used convex inner approximation replaces…
Counterfactual Explanations (CE) face several unresolved challenges, such as ensuring stability, synthesizing multiple CEs, and providing plausibility and sparsity guarantees. From a more practical point of view, recent studies [Pawelczyk…
Conditional autoregressive (CAR) models are commonly used to capture spatial correlation in areal unit data, and are typically specified as a prior distribution for a set of random effects, as part of a hierarchical Bayesian model. The…
Surprise describes a range of phenomena from unexpected events to behavioral responses. We propose a measure of surprise and use it for surprise-driven learning. Our surprise measure takes into account data likelihood as well as the degree…
A highly accurate but overconfident model is ill-suited for deployment in critical applications such as healthcare and autonomous driving. The classification outcome should reflect a high uncertainty on ambiguous in-distribution samples…
In this paper, we introduce and develop the concept of conditional quantization for Borel probability measures on $\mathbb{R}^k,$ considering both constrained and unconstrained frameworks. For each setting, we define the associated…
Contextual refinement (CR) is one of the standard notions of specifying open programs. CR has two main advantages: (i) (horizontal and vertical) compositionality that allows us to decompose a large contextual refinement into many smaller…