Related papers: Average Bias and Polynomial Sources
Randomized experiments have long been the gold standard for scientists seeking to learn about cause and effect. When randomized experiments are infeasible, scientists often resort to observational studies, which are widely available and…
In a thought-provoking paper, Efron (2011) investigated the merit and limitation of an empirical Bayes method to correct selection bias based on Tweedie's formula first reported by \cite{Robbins:1956}. The exceptional virtue of Tweedie's…
It is a common contention that it is an ``impossible mission'' to exactly determine the minimum sample size for the estimation of a binomial parameter with prescribed margin of error and confidence level. In this paper, we investigate such…
We investigate the concept of entropy in probabilistic theories more general than quantum mechanics, with particular reference to the notion of information causality recently proposed by Pawlowski et. al. (arXiv:0905.2992). We consider two…
This paper considers the entropy of the sum of (possibly dependent and non-identically distributed) Bernoulli random variables. Upper bounds on the error that follows from an approximation of this entropy by the entropy of a Poisson random…
We consider the problem of learning a discrete distribution in the presence of an $\epsilon$ fraction of malicious data sources. Specifically, we consider the setting where there is some underlying distribution, $p$, and each data source…
Randomness extractors are algorithms that distill weak random sources into near-perfect random numbers. Two-source extractors enable this distillation process by combining two independent weak random sources. Raz's extractor (STOC '05) was…
Let $(Z_k)_{k\geq 1}$ be a sequence of independent and identically distributed complex random variables with common distribution $\mu$ and let $P_n(X):=\prod_{k=1}^n (X-Z_k)$ the associated random polynomial in $\mathbb C[X]$. In [Kab15],…
Motivated by the need, in some Bayesian likelihood free inference problems, of imputing a multivariate counting distribution based on its vector of means and variance-covariance matrix, we define a generic multivariate discrete…
There has been much progress on efficient algorithms for clustering data points generated by a mixture of $k$ probability distributions under the assumption that the means of the distributions are well-separated, i.e., the distance between…
Standard maximum-likelihood estimators for binary-star and exoplanet eccentricities are biased high, in the sense that the estimated eccentricity tends to be larger than the true eccentricity. As with most non-trivial observables, a simple…
In classification, the de facto method for aggregating individual losses is the average loss. When the actual metric of interest is 0-1 loss, it is common to minimize the average surrogate loss for some well-behaved (e.g. convex) surrogate.…
We present a new method for obtaining norm bounds for random matrices, where each entry is a low-degree polynomial in an underlying set of independent real-valued random variables. Such matrices arise in a variety of settings in the…
Weighting methods are widely used to adjust for covariates in observational studies, sample surveys, and regression settings. In this paper, we study a class of recently proposed weighting methods which find the weights of minimum…
Suppose one desires to randomly sample a pair of objects such as socks, hoping to get a matching pair. Even in the simplest situation for sampling, which is sampling with replacement, the innocent phrase "the distribution of the color of a…
The well known maximum-entropy principle due to Jaynes, which states that given mean parameters, the maximum entropy distribution matching them is in an exponential family, has been very popular in machine learning due to its "Occam's…
Randomization is a common technique used in clinical trials to eliminate potential bias and confounders in a patient population. Equal allocation to treatment groups is the standard due to its optimal efficiency in many cases. However, in…
Consider the set of source distributions within a fixed maximum relative entropy with respect to a given nominal distribution. Lossless source coding over this relative entropy ball can be approached in more than one way. A problem…
Consider the task of generating samples from a tilted distribution of a random vector whose underlying distribution is unknown, but samples from it are available. This finds applications in fields such as finance and climate science, and in…
Consider two correlated sources $X$ and $Y$ generated from a joint distribution $p_{X,Y}$. Their G\'acs-K\"orner Common Information, a measure of common information that exploits the combinatorial structure of the distribution $p_{X,Y}$,…