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Simulation models, in particular agent-based models, are gaining popularity in economics. The considerable flexibility they offer, as well as their capacity to reproduce a variety of empirically observed behaviours of complex systems, give…

Econometrics · Economics 2024-02-20 Joel Dyer , Patrick Cannon , J. Doyne Farmer , Sebastian Schmon

The analysis of optical images of galaxy-galaxy strong gravitational lensing systems can provide important information about the distribution of dark matter at small scales. However, the modeling and statistical analysis of these images is…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2020-11-30 Adam Coogan , Konstantin Karchev , Christoph Weniger

For many decades now, Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) has been a popular framework to systematically account for model uncertainty that arises in situations when multiple competing models are available to describe the same or similar…

Computation · Statistics 2022-03-29 Vojtech Kejzlar , Shrijita Bhattacharya , Mookyong Son , Tapabrata Maiti

We study the problem of estimating a distribution over a finite alphabet from an i.i.d. sample, with accuracy measured in relative entropy (Kullback-Leibler divergence). While optimal bounds on the expected risk are known, high-probability…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-02-27 Jaouad Mourtada

Bayesian calibration of black-box computer models offers an established framework to obtain a posterior distribution over model parameters. Traditional Bayesian calibration involves the emulation of the computer model and an additive model…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-30 Sébastien Marmin , Maurizio Filippone

Discretization of continuous-time diffusion processes is a widely recognized method for sampling. However, it seems to be a considerable restriction when the potentials are often required to be smooth (gradient Lipschitz). This paper…

Computation · Statistics 2022-02-23 Dao Nguyen

Gaussian processes are ubiquitous in machine learning, statistics, and applied mathematics. They provide a flexible modelling framework for approximating functions, whilst simultaneously quantifying uncertainty. However, this is only true…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-05-19 George Wynne , François-Xavier Briol , Mark Girolami

Industrial experimental designs frequently lack optimal space-filling properties, rendering them unrepresentative. This study presents a comprehensive methodology to refine existing designs by enhancing coverage quality while optimizing…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-02 Thomas Bartz-Beielstein , Eva Bartz , Alexander Hinterleitner , Christoph Leitenmeier , Ihab Abd El Hussein

We propose a novel zeroth-order optimization algorithm based on an efficient sampling strategy. Under mild global regularity conditions on the objective function, we establish non-asymptotic convergence rates for the proposed method.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-24 Xicheng Zhang

Variational inference is a technique that approximates a target distribution by optimizing within the parameter space of variational families. On the other hand, Wasserstein gradient flows describe optimization within the space of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-01 Mingxuan Yi , Song Liu

Nowadays, the use of machine learning models is becoming a utility in many applications. Companies deliver pre-trained models encapsulated as application programming interfaces (APIs) that developers combine with third party components and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 José Mena , Oriol Pujol , Jordi Vitrià

This paper presents a novel Importance Sampling (IS) scheme for estimating distribution tails of performance measures modeled with a rich set of tools such as linear programs, integer linear programs, piecewise linear/quadratic objectives,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-11 Anand Deo , Karthyek Murthy

We deal with the problem of gradient estimation for stochastic differentiable relaxations of algorithms, operators, simulators, and other non-differentiable functions. Stochastic smoothing conventionally perturbs the input of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Felix Petersen , Christian Borgelt , Aashwin Mishra , Stefano Ermon

The inferential model (IM) framework offers alternatives to the familiar probabilistic (e.g., Bayesian and fiducial) uncertainty quantification in statistical inference. Allowing this uncertainty quantification to be imprecise makes it…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-12-10 Ryan Martin , Jonathan P. Williams

Stochastic differentiable approximation schemes are widely used for solving high dimensional problems. Most of existing methods satisfy some desirable properties, including conditional descent inequalities, and almost sure (a.s.)…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-08 Jean-Baptiste Fest , Audrey Repetti , Emilie Chouzenoux

We present an information-theoretic approach to lower bound the oracle complexity of nonsmooth black box convex optimization, unifying previous lower bounding techniques by identifying a combinatorial problem, namely string guessing, as a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-10 Gábor Braun , Cristóbal Guzmán , Sebastian Pokutta

Bayesian nonparametric regression under a rescaled Gaussian process prior offers smoothness-adaptive function estimation with near minimax-optimal error rates. Hierarchical extensions of this approach, equipped with stochastic variable…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-12-15 Sheng Jiang , Surya T. Tokdar

Understanding the behavior of learned classifiers is an important task, and various black-box explanations, logical reasoning approaches, and model-specific methods have been proposed. In this paper, we introduce probabilistic sufficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-24 Eric Wang , Pasha Khosravi , Guy Van den Broeck

Feature attributions are a popular tool for explaining the behavior of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), but have recently been shown to be vulnerable to attacks that produce divergent explanations for nearby inputs. This lack of robustness is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Zifan Wang , Haofan Wang , Shakul Ramkumar , Matt Fredrikson , Piotr Mardziel , Anupam Datta

We revisit Markowitz's mean-variance portfolio selection model by considering a distributionally robust version, where the region of distributional uncertainty is around the empirical measure and the discrepancy between probability measures…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-02-15 Jose Blanchet , Lin Chen , Xun Yu Zhou