Related papers: Empirical Variance Minimization with Applications …
We study the optimal rates of convergence for estimating a prior distribution over a VC class from a sequence of independent data sets respectively labeled by independent target functions sampled from the prior. We specifically derive upper…
Flexible variational distributions improve variational inference but are harder to optimize. In this work we present a control variate that is applicable for any reparameterizable distribution with known mean and covariance matrix, e.g.…
In this paper, we consider asymptotics of the optimal value and the optimal solutions of parametric minimax estimation problems. Specifically, we consider estimators of the optimal value and the optimal solutions in a sample minimax problem…
A central topic in functional data analysis is how to design an optimaldecision rule, based on training samples, to classify a data function. We exploit the optimal classification problem when data functions are Gaussian processes. Sharp…
This paper studies the use of a machine learning-based estimator as a control variate for mitigating the variance of Monte Carlo sampling. Specifically, we seek to uncover the key factors that influence the efficiency of control variates in…
Sample average approximation (SAA) replaces an intractable expected objective by an empirical average and is a basic device of modern stochastic optimization. We develop a rate theory for optimal values and empirical…
We develop a family of accelerated stochastic algorithms that minimize sums of convex functions. Our algorithms improve upon the fastest running time for empirical risk minimization (ERM), and in particular linear least-squares regression,…
This paper develops new extremal principles of variational analysis that are motivated by applications to constrained problems of stochastic programming and semi-infinite programming without smoothness and/or convexity assumptions. These…
We investigate an empirical quantile estimation approach to solve chance-constrained nonlinear optimization problems. Our approach is based on the reformulation of the chance constraint as an equivalent quantile constraint to provide…
In the statistical problem of denoising, Bayes and empirical Bayes methods can "overshrink" their output relative to the latent variables of interest. This work is focused on constrained denoising problems which mitigate such phenomena. At…
This paper is concerned with the design of optimal control for finite-dimensional control-affine nonlinear dynamical systems. We introduce an optimal control problem that specifically optimizes nonlinear observability in addition to…
We study optimal procedures for estimating a linear functional based on observational data. In many problems of this kind, a widely used assumption is strict overlap, i.e., uniform boundedness of the importance ratio, which measures how…
We consider learning methods based on the regularization of a convex empirical risk by a squared Hilbertian norm, a setting that includes linear predictors and non-linear predictors through positive-definite kernels. In order to go beyond…
Affine policies (or control) are widely used as a solution approach in dynamic optimization where computing an optimal adjustable solution is usually intractable. While the worst case performance of affine policies can be significantly bad,…
Nonlocal operators of fractional type are a popular modeling choice for applications that do not adhere to classical diffusive behavior; however, one major challenge in nonlocal simulations is the selection of model parameters. In this work…
The optimal control of epidemic-like stochastic processes is important both historically and for emerging applications today, where it can be especially important to include time-varying parameters that impact viral epidemic-like…
It is well known that Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) may attain minimax suboptimal rates in terms of the mean squared error (Birg\'e and Massart, 1993). In this paper, we prove that, under relatively mild assumptions, the suboptimality…
We study problem-dependent rates, i.e., generalization errors that scale near-optimally with the variance, the effective loss, or the gradient norms evaluated at the "best hypothesis." We introduce a principled framework dubbed "uniform…
We study a general class of convex submodular optimization problems with indicator variables. Many applications such as the problem of inferring Markov random fields (MRFs) with a sparsity or robustness prior can be naturally modeled in…
We study a family of optimal control problems in which one aims at minimizing a cost that mixes a quadratic control penalization and the variance of the system, both for finitely many agents and for the mean-field dynamics as their number…