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Systems are typically made from simple components regardless of their complexity. While the function of each part is easily understood, higher order functions are emergent properties and are notoriously difficult to explain. In networked…
The problem of sequential change diagnosis is considered, where observations are obtained on-line, an abrupt change occurs in their distribution, and the goal is to quickly detect the change and accurately identify the post-change…
In several applications of automatic diagnosis and active learning a central problem is the evaluation of a discrete function by adaptively querying the values of its variables until the values read uniquely determine the value of the…
Bandit algorithms are guaranteed to solve diverse sequential decision-making problems, provided that a sufficient exploration budget is available. However, learning from scratch is often too costly for personalization tasks where a single…
In this work, we consider a time-varying stochastic saddle point problem in which the objective is revealed sequentially, and the data distribution depends on the decision variables. Problems of this type express the distributional…
Methods for sequential decision-making are often built upon a foundational assumption that the underlying decision process is stationary. This limits the application of such methods because real-world problems are often subject to changes…
Motivated by applications where impatience is pervasive and evaluation times are uncertain, we study a selection model where options may expire at an unknown point in time and evaluation times are stochastic. Initially, the decision-maker…
A non-deterministic recursion scheme recognizes a language of finite trees. This very expressive model can simulate, among others, higher-order pushdown automata with collapse. We show decidability of the diagonal problem for schemes. This…
We consider the distributed channel access problem for a system consisting of multiple control subsystems that close their loop over a shared wireless network. We propose a distributed method for providing deterministic channel access…
Representing distributions over permutations can be a daunting task due to the fact that the number of permutations of $n$ objects scales factorially in $n$. One recent way that has been used to reduce storage complexity has been to exploit…
Binomial distributions capture the probabilities of `heads' outcomes when a (biased) coin is tossed multiple times. The coin may be identified with a distribution on the two-element set {0,1}, where the 1 outcome corresponds to `head'. One…
This paper considers a distributed stochastic optimization problem where the goal is to minimize the time average of a cost function subject to a set of constraints on the time averages of a related stochastic processes called penalties. We…
Sensory observations about the world are invariably ambiguous. Inference about the world's latent variables is thus an important computation for the brain. However, computational constraints limit the performance of these computations.…
The characterization of the "most connected" nodes in static or slowly evolving complex networks has helped in understanding and predicting the behavior of social, biological, and technological networked systems, including their robustness…
Probabilistic dependency graphs (PDGs) are a flexible class of probabilistic graphical models, subsuming Bayesian Networks and Factor Graphs. They can also capture inconsistent beliefs, and provide a way of measuring the degree of this…
Statistical learning relies upon data sampled from a distribution, and we usually do not care what actually generated it in the first place. From the point of view of causal modeling, the structure of each distribution is induced by…
We address the problem of determining if a discrete time switched consensus system converges for any switching sequence and that of determining if it converges for at least one switching sequence. For these two problems, we provide…
We propose a mechanism design framework that incorporates both soft information, which can be freely manipulated, and semi-hard information, which entails a cost for falsification. The framework captures various contexts such as school…
We consider a retailer selling a single product with limited on-hand inventory over a finite selling season. Customer demand arrives according to a Poisson process, the rate of which is influenced by a single action taken by the retailer…
We study the problems of sequential nonparametric two-sample and independence testing. Sequential tests process data online and allow using observed data to decide whether to stop and reject the null hypothesis or to collect more data,…