Related papers: A Polynomial Time Algorithm for Maximum Likelihood…
We describe $k$-MLE, a fast and efficient local search algorithm for learning finite statistical mixtures of exponential families such as Gaussian mixture models. Mixture models are traditionally learned using the expectation-maximization…
Monte Carlo maximum likelihood (MCML) provides an elegant approach to find maximum likelihood estimators (MLEs) for latent variable models. However, MCML algorithms are computationally expensive when the latent variables are…
We consider the problem of estimating the joint distribution function of the event time and a continuous mark variable based on censored data. More specifically, the event time is subject to current status censoring and the continuous mark…
Convex composition optimization is an emerging topic that covers a wide range of applications arising from stochastic optimal control, reinforcement learning and multi-stage stochastic programming. Existing algorithms suffer from…
First-order methods for stochastic optimization have undeniable relevance, in part due to their pivotal role in machine learning. Variance reduction for these algorithms has become an important research topic. In contrast to common…
This paper presents a novel stochastic optimisation methodology to perform empirical Bayesian inference in semi-blind image deconvolution problems. Given a blurred image and a parametric class of possible operators, the proposed…
A number of problems in quantum state and system identification are addressed. Specifically, it is shown that the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) approach, already known to apply to quantum state tomography, is also applicable to…
Majorization-minimization algorithms consist of iteratively minimizing a majorizing surrogate of an objective function. Because of its simplicity and its wide applicability, this principle has been very popular in statistics and in signal…
We explore the possibility of evaluating flow harmonics by employing the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE). For a given finite multiplicity, the MLE simultaneously furnishes estimations for all the parameters of the underlying distribution…
We develop and analyze stochastic optimization algorithms for problems in which the expected loss is strongly convex, and the optimum is (approximately) sparse. Previous approaches are able to exploit only one of these two structures,…
Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) is an iterative algorithm used to generate samples from a distribution that is known only up to a normalizing constant. The nonasymptotic dependence of its mixing time on the dimension and target accuracy is…
Motivated by studying asymptotic properties of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) in stochastic volatility (SV) models, in this paper we investigate likelihood estimation in state space models. We first prove, under some regularity…
We consider the problem of estimating a regularization parameter, or a shrinkage coefficient $\alpha \in (0,1)$ for Regularized Tyler's M-estimator (RTME). In particular, we propose to estimate an optimal shrinkage coefficient by setting…
We establish efficient approximate counting algorithms for several natural problems in local lemma regimes. In particular, we consider the probability of intersection of events and the dimension of intersection of subspaces. Our approach is…
Finding the length of the longest increasing subsequence (LIS) is a classic algorithmic problem. Let $n$ denote the size of the array. Simple $O(n\log n)$ algorithms are known for this problem. We develop a polylogarithmic time randomized…
In this paper, we consider distributed maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) with dependent quantized data under the assumption that the structure of the joint probability density function (pdf) is known, but it contains unknown deterministic…
Stochastic Differential Equations (SDEs) are used as statistical models in many disciplines. However, intractable likelihood functions for SDEs make inference challenging, and we need to resort to simulation-based techniques to estimate and…
The sparse inverse covariance estimation problem is commonly solved using an $\ell_{1}$-regularized Gaussian maximum likelihood estimator known as "graphical lasso", but its computational cost becomes prohibitive for large data sets. A…
We study the classical problem of deriving minimax rates for density estimation over convex density classes. Building on the pioneering work of Le Cam (1973), Birge (1983, 1986), Wong and Shen (1995), Yang and Barron (1999), we determine…
We consider the problem of sampling from a log-concave distribution $\pi(\theta) \propto e^{-f(\theta)}$ constrained to a polytope $K:=\{\theta \in \mathbb{R}^d: A\theta \leq b\}$, where $A\in \mathbb{R}^{m\times d}$ and $b \in…