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We study the problem of robustly estimating the mean or location parameter without moment assumptions. We show that for a large class of symmetric distributions, the same error as in the Gaussian setting can be achieved efficiently. The…
Gaussian processes are a powerful framework for quantifying uncertainty and for sequential decision-making but are limited by the requirement of solving linear systems. In general, this has a cubic cost in dataset size and is sensitive to…
In this paper, we study the conditional stochastic optimization (CSO) problem which covers a variety of applications including portfolio selection, reinforcement learning, robust learning, causal inference, etc. The sample-averaged gradient…
In this paper, we propose a unified view of gradient-based algorithms for stochastic convex composite optimization by extending the concept of estimate sequence introduced by Nesterov. More precisely, we interpret a large class of…
Bayesian inference is a popular method to build learning algorithms but it is hampered by the fact that its key object, the posterior probability distribution, is often uncomputable. Expectation Propagation (EP) (Minka (2001)) is a popular…
Active learning algorithms select a subset of data for annotation to maximize the model performance on a budget. One such algorithm is Expected Gradient Length, which as the name suggests uses the approximate gradient induced per example in…
Non-uniform sampling arises when an experimenter does not have full control over the sampling characteristics of the process under investigation. Moreover, it is introduced intentionally in algorithms such as Bayesian optimization and…
We devise a distributed asynchronous stochastic epsilon-gradient-based algorithm to enable a network of computing and communicating nodes to solve a constrained discrete-time time-varying stochastic convex optimization problem. Each node…
The convergence of expectation-maximization (EM)-based algorithms typically requires continuity of the likelihood function with respect to all the unknown parameters (optimization variables). The requirement is not met when parameters…
We provide an algorithm for properly learning mixtures of two single-dimensional Gaussians without any separability assumptions. Given $\tilde{O}(1/\varepsilon^2)$ samples from an unknown mixture, our algorithm outputs a mixture that is…
Modern statistical inference tasks often require iterative optimization methods to compute the solution. Convergence analysis from an optimization viewpoint only informs us how well the solution is approximated numerically but overlooks the…
The Expectation--Maximization (EM) algorithm is a simple meta-algorithm that has been used for many years as a methodology for statistical inference when there are missing measurements in the observed data or when the data is composed of…
In this paper we introduce a class of novel distributed algorithms for solving stochastic big-data convex optimization problems over directed graphs. In the addressed set-up, the dimension of the decision variable can be extremely high and…
A new gradient-based optimization approach by automatically scheduling the learning rate has been proposed recently, which is called Binary Forward Exploration (BFE). The Adaptive version of BFE has also been discussed thereafter. In this…
This paper proposes Incremental Seeded Expectation Maximization, an algorithm that improves upon the traditional Expectation Maximization computational flow for clusterwise or finite mixture linear regression tasks. The proposed method…
We consider a class of hypothesis testing problems where the null hypothesis postulates $M$ distributions for the observed data, and there is only one possible distribution under the alternative. We show that one can use a stochastic mirror…
The expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is a well-known iterative method for computing maximum likelihood estimates from incomplete data. Despite its numerous advantages, a main drawback of the EM algorithm is its frequently observed…
Classification tasks are usually evaluated in terms of accuracy. However, accuracy is discontinuous and cannot be directly optimized using gradient ascent. Popular methods minimize cross-entropy, hinge loss, or other surrogate losses, which…
We consider the problem of hypothesis testing for discrete distributions. In the standard model, where we have sample access to an underlying distribution $p$, extensive research has established optimal bounds for uniformity testing,…
The Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm is a key reference for inference in latent variable models; unfortunately, its computational cost is prohibitive in the large scale learning setting. In this paper, we propose an extension of the…