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In this paper, we propose a novel robust stochastic optimization approach with a distinctive consideration for rare events, in which divergence measures are used to bound the event-wise ambiguity sets. This is done by using the Poisson…
This paper considers structural optimization under a reliability constraint, where the input distribution is only partially known. Specifically, when we only know that the expected value vector and the variance-covariance matrix of the…
We propose a general algorithm for approximating nonstandard Bayesian posterior distributions. The algorithm minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence of an approximating distribution to the intractable posterior distribution. Our method…
Maximum likelihood estimation in logistic regression with mixed effects is known to often result in estimates on the boundary of the parameter space. Such estimates, which include infinite values for fixed effects and singular or infinite…
This work introduces a method for fitting to the degree distributions of complex network datasets, such that the most appropriate distribution from a set of candidate distributions is chosen while maximizing the portion of the distribution…
The maximum entropy principle is a powerful tool for solving underdetermined inverse problems. This paper considers the problem of discretizing a continuous distribution, which arises in various applied fields. We obtain the approximating…
This paper considers properties of an optimization based sampler for targeting the posterior distribution when the likelihood is intractable and auxiliary statistics are used to summarize information in the data. Our reverse sampler…
We study the maximum likelihood estimator of density of $n$ independent observations, under the assumption that it is well approximated by a mixture with a large number of components. The main focus is on statistical properties with respect…
We propose a novel distribution-free scheme to solve optimization problems where the goal is to minimize the expected value of a cost function subject to probabilistic constraints. Unlike standard sampling-based methods, our idea consists…
The class of Cressie-Read empirical likelihoods are constructed with weights derived at a minimum distance from the empirical distribution in the Cressie-Read family of divergences indexed by $\gamma$ under the constraint of an unbiased set…
Obtaining guarantees on the convergence of the minimizers of empirical risks to the ones of the true risk is a fundamental matter in statistical learning. Instead of deriving guarantees on the usual estimation error, the goal of this paper…
Finite-precision floating point arithmetic unavoidably introduces rounding errors which are traditionally bounded using a worst-case analysis. However, worst-case analysis might be overly conservative because worst-case errors can be…
The discrete moment problem is a foundational problem in distribution-free robust optimization, where the goal is to find a worst-case distribution that satisfies a given set of moments. This paper studies the discrete moment problems with…
We consider settings in which the distribution of a multivariate random variable is partly ambiguous. We assume the ambiguity lies on the level of the dependence structure, and that the marginal distributions are known. Furthermore, a…
The problem of finding the minimizer of a sum of convex functions is central to the field of distributed optimization. Thus, it is of interest to understand how that minimizer is related to the properties of the individual functions in the…
We consider a generalization of the classifier-based density-ratio estimation task to a quasiprobabilistic setting where probability densities can be negative. The problem with most loss functions used for this task is that they implicitly…
Gaussian process regression underpins countless academic and industrial applications of machine learning and statistics, with maximum likelihood estimation routinely used to select appropriate parameters for the covariance kernel. However,…
In this paper, an optimization problem with uncertain constraint coefficients is considered. Possibility theory is used to model the uncertainty. Namely, a joint possibility distribution in constraint coefficient realizations, called…
We describe a probabilistic methodology, based on random walk estimates, to obtain exponential upper bounds for the probability of observing unusually small maximal components in two classical (near-)critical random graph models. More…
We study an optimal control problem in which both the objective function and the dynamic constraint contain an uncertain parameter. Since the distribution of this uncertain parameter is not exactly known, the objective function is taken as…