Related papers: Tightness of the maximum likelihood semidefinite r…
Mixture distributions with dynamic weights are an efficient way of modeling loss data characterized by heavy tails. However, maximum likelihood estimation of this family of models is difficult, mostly because of the need to evaluate…
Real-valued Phase retrieval is a non-convex continuous inference problem, where a high-dimensional signal is to be reconstructed from a dataset of signless linear measurements. Focusing on the noiseless case, we aim to disentangle the two…
The generalized smooth condition, $(L_{0},L_{1})$-smoothness, has triggered people's interest since it is more realistic in many optimization problems shown by both empirical and theoretical evidence. Two recent works established the…
We study the optimization landscape of the log-likelihood function and the convergence of the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm in latent Gaussian tree models, i.e. tree-structured Gaussian graphical models whose leaf nodes are…
Polychoric correlation is often an important building block in the analysis of rating data, particularly for structural equation models. However, the commonly employed maximum likelihood (ML) estimator is highly susceptible to…
Complex networked systems driven by latent inputs are common in fields like neuroscience, finance, and engineering. A key inference problem here is to learn edge connectivity from node outputs (potentials). We focus on systems governed by…
The maximum likelihood amplitude estimation algorithm (MLAE) is a practical solution to the quantum amplitude estimation problem with Heisenberg limit error convergence. We improve MLAE by using random depths to avoid the so-called critical…
We analyze the clustering problem through a flexible probabilistic model that aims to identify an optimal partition on the sample X 1 , ..., X n. We perform exact clustering with high probability using a convex semidefinite estimator that…
The classical alternating current optimal power flow problem is highly nonconvex and generally hard to solve. Convex relaxations, in particular semidefinite, second-order cone, convex quadratic, and linear relaxations, have recently…
We consider the matrix completion problem under a form of row/column weighted entrywise sampling, including the case of uniform entrywise sampling as a special case. We analyze the associated random observation operator, and prove that with…
In this paper, we mainly focus on the penalized maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) of the high-dimensional approximate factor model. Since the current estimation procedure can not guarantee the positive definiteness of the error covariance…
Ellipsoid fitting is of general interest in machine vision, such as object detection and shape approximation. Most existing approaches rely on the least-squares fitting of quadrics, minimizing the algebraic or geometric distances, with…
Spectral learning recently generated lots of excitement in machine learning, largely because it is the first known method to produce consistent estimates (under suitable conditions) for several latent variable models. In contrast, maximum…
To understand how hidden information can be extracted from statistical networks, planted models in random graphs have been the focus of intensive study in recent years. In this work, we consider the detection of a planted matching, i.e., an…
In this paper we propose a modified version of the simulated annealing algorithm for solving a stochastic global optimization problem. More precisely, we address the problem of finding a global minimizer of a function with noisy…
We consider the problem of computing a positive definite $p \times p$ inverse covariance matrix aka precision matrix $\theta=(\theta_{ij})$ which optimizes a regularized Gaussian maximum likelihood problem, with the elastic-net regularizer…
The behavior of maximum likelihood estimates (MLEs) and the likelihood ratio statistic in a family of problems involving pointwise nonparametric estimation of a monotone function is studied. This class of problems differs radically from the…
Anomaly estimation, or the problem of finding a subset of a dataset that differs from the rest of the dataset, is a classic problem in machine learning and data mining. In both theoretical work and in applications, the anomaly is assumed to…
This work studies the properties of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of a non-linear model with Gaussian errors and multidimensional parameter. The observations are collected in a two-stage experimental design and are dependent since…
Clock skew compensation is essential for accurate time synchronization in wireless networks. However, contemporary clock skew estimation is based on inaccurate transmission time measurement, which makes credible estimation challenging.…