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Distributed algorithms and theories are called for in this era of big data. Under weaker local signal-to-noise ratios, we improve upon the celebrated one-round distributed principal component analysis (PCA) algorithm designed in the spirit…
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in using machine learning techniques for the estimation of treatment effects. Most of the best-performing methods rely on representation learning strategies that encourage shared behavior…
The difference-of-convex algorithm (DCA) is a conceptually simple method for the minimization of (possibly) nonconvex functions that are expressed as the difference of two convex functions. At each iteration, DCA constructs a global…
The paper provides global optimization algorithms for two particularly difficult nonconvex problems raised by hybrid system identification: switching linear regression and bounded-error estimation. While most works focus on local…
Block-coordinate descent (BCD) is the method of choice to solve numerous large scale optimization problems, however their theoretical study for non-convex optimization, has received less attention. In this paper, we present a new…
Group-Lasso (gLasso) identifies important explanatory factors in predicting the response variable by considering the grouping structure over input variables. However, most existing algorithms for gLasso are not scalable to deal with…
We propose a variable decomposition algorithm -greedy block coordinate descent (GBCD)- in order to make dense Gaussian process regression practical for large scale problems. GBCD breaks a large scale optimization into a series of small…
Block coordinate descent (BCD) methods are widely used for large-scale numerical optimization because of their cheap iteration costs, low memory requirements, amenability to parallelization, and ability to exploit problem structure. Three…
G-computation is a powerful method for estimating unconditional treatment effects with covariate adjustment in randomized clinical trials. It typically relies on fitting canonical generalized linear models. However, this could be…
In this paper, we are interested in finding the global minimizer of a nonsmooth nonconvex unconstrained optimization problem. By combining the discrete consensus-based optimization (CBO) algorithm and the gradient descent method, we develop…
Unexpected stimuli induce "error" or "surprise" signals in the brain. The theory of predictive coding promises to explain these observations in terms of Bayesian inference by suggesting that the cortex implements variational inference in a…
The stochastic gradient (SG) method can minimize an objective function composed of a large number of differentiable functions, or solve a stochastic optimization problem, to a moderate accuracy. The block coordinate descent/update (BCD)…
In many applications, gradient evaluations are inherently approximate, motivating the development of optimization methods that remain reliable under inexact first-order information. A common strategy in this context is adaptive evaluation,…
Divide and Conquer (DC) is conceptually well suited to high-dimensional optimization by decomposing a problem into multiple small-scale sub-problems. However, appealing performance can be seldom observed when the sub-problems are…
In this paper, we showcase the interplay between discrete and continuous optimization in network-structured settings. We propose the first fully decentralized optimization method for a wide class of non-convex objective functions that…
Local counts, or the number of objects in a local area, is a continuous value by nature. Yet recent state-of-the-art methods show that formulating counting as a classification task performs better than regression. Through a series of…
Variable selection in linear regression has been a central topic in statistical research for decades. Bayesian variable selection methods, which account for uncertainty in both the regression coefficients and the noise variance, have…
This article explores distributed convex optimization with globally-coupled constraints, where the objective function is a general nonsmooth convex function, the constraints include nonlinear inequalities and affine equalities, and the…
Recently, a new class of non-convex optimization problems motivated by the statistical problem of learning an acyclic directed graphical model from data has attracted significant interest. While existing work uses standard first-order…
This paper presents a class of new algorithms for distributed statistical estimation that exploit divide-and-conquer approach. We show that one of the key benefits of the divide-and-conquer strategy is robustness, an important…