Related papers: Optimality of Maximum Likelihood for Log-Concave D…
The entropy per coordinate in a log-concave random vector of any dimension with given density at the mode is shown to have a range of just 1. Uniform distributions on convex bodies are at the lower end of this range, the distribution with…
We study the maximum likelihood estimator of density of $n$ independent observations, under the assumption that it is well approximated by a mixture with a large number of components. The main focus is on statistical properties with respect…
Consider a regression problem where the learner is given a large collection of $d$-dimensional data points, but can only query a small subset of the real-valued labels. How many queries are needed to obtain a $1+\epsilon$ relative error…
We consider the non-parametric maximum likelihood estimation in the class of Polya frequency functions of order two, viz. the densities with a concave logarithm. This is a subclass of unimodal densities and fairly rich in general. The NPMLE…
We study differentially private (DP) algorithms for stochastic convex optimization: the problem of minimizing the population loss given i.i.d. samples from a distribution over convex loss functions. A recent work of Bassily et al. (2019)…
We provide a new convergence analysis of stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) for sampling from a class of distributions that can be non-log-concave. At the core of our approach is a novel conductance analysis of SGLD using an…
We study multistage distributionally robust linear optimization, where the uncertainty set is defined as a ball of distribution centered at a scenario tree using the nested distance. The resulting minimax problem is notoriously difficult to…
In this note we study the maximal perimeter of a convex set in $\mathbb{R}^n$ with respect to various classes of measures. Firstly, we show that for a probability measure $\mu$ on $ \mathbb{R}^n$, satisfying very mild assumptions, there…
In constrained stochastic optimization, one naturally expects that imposing a stricter feasible set does not increase the statistical risk of an estimator defined by projection onto that set. In this paper, we show that this intuition can…
We study parameter estimation in linear Gaussian covariance models, which are $p$-dimensional Gaussian models with linear constraints on the covariance matrix. Maximum likelihood estimation for this class of models leads to a non-convex…
We develop a technique for establishing lower bounds on the sample complexity of Least Squares (or, Empirical Risk Minimization) for large classes of functions. As an application, we settle an open problem regarding optimality of Least…
Logconcave functions represent the current frontier of efficient algorithms for sampling, optimization and integration in R^n. Efficient sampling algorithms to sample according to a probability density (to which the other two problems can…
We investigate the stochastic optimization problem of minimizing population risk, where the loss defining the risk is assumed to be weakly convex. Compositions of Lipschitz convex functions with smooth maps are the primary examples of such…
We study stochastic optimization problems with chance and risk constraints, where in the latter, risk is quantified in terms of the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR). We consider the distributionally robust versions of these problems, where…
We investigate approximation guarantees provided by logistic regression for the fundamental problem of agnostic learning of homogeneous halfspaces. Previously, for a certain broad class of "well-behaved" distributions on the examples,…
From an optimizer's perspective, achieving the global optimum for a general nonconvex problem is often provably NP-hard using the classical worst-case analysis. In the case of Cox's proportional hazards model, by taking its statistical…
In this paper we present a general convex optimization approach for solving high-dimensional multiple response tensor regression problems under low-dimensional structural assumptions. We consider using convex and weakly decomposable…
We study the problem of sampling from a distribution $\target$ using the Langevin Monte Carlo algorithm and provide rate of convergences for this algorithm in terms of Wasserstein distance of order $2$. Our result holds as long as the…
We prove upper bounds on the $L^\infty$-Wasserstein distance from optimal transport between strongly log-concave probability densities and log-Lipschitz perturbations. In the simplest setting, such a bound amounts to a transport-information…
We study density estimation in Kullback-Leibler divergence: given an i.i.d. sample from an unknown density $p^\star$, the goal is to construct an estimator $\widehat{p}$ such that $\mathrm{KL}(p^\star,\widehat{p})$ is small with high…