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The Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle states that the optimal model for a given data set is that which compresses it best. Due to practial limitations the model can be restricted to a class such as linear regression models, which…
High-resolution daytime satellite imagery has become a promising source to study economic activities. These images display detailed terrain over large areas and allow zooming into smaller neighborhoods. Existing methods, however, have…
Large Language Models can generate synthetic survey responses at low cost, but their accuracy varies unpredictably across questions. We study the design problem of allocating a fixed budget of human respondents across estimation tasks when…
In the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle, learning from the data is equivalent to an optimal coding problem. We show that the codes that achieve optimal compression in MDL are critical in a very precise sense. First, when they are…
Minimum Description Length (MDL) estimators, using two-part codes for universal coding, are analyzed. For general parametric families under certain regularity conditions, we introduce a two-part code whose regret is close to the minimax…
A novel framework is introduced to formalize identifiability in well-specified but ill-posed linear regression models. The framework is distribution-free and accommodates highly correlated features that may or may not relate to the…
Model selection is central to statistics, and many learning problems can be formulated as model selection problems. In this paper, we treat the problem of selecting a maximum entropy model given various feature subsets and their moments, as…
Complexity is a fundamental concept underlying statistical learning theory that aims to inform generalization performance. Parameter count, while successful in low-dimensional settings, is not well-justified for overparameterized settings…
Work in machine learning and statistics commonly focuses on building models that capture the vast majority of data, possibly ignoring a segment of the population as outliers. However, there does not often exist a good model on the whole…
We investigate the problem of best policy identification in discounted linear Markov Decision Processes in the fixed confidence setting under a generative model. We first derive an instance-specific lower bound on the expected number of…
In many complex systems, networks and graphs arise in a natural manner. Often, time evolving behavior can be easily found and modeled using time-series methodology. Amongst others, two common research problems in network analysis are…
The power of sparse signal coding with learned dictionaries has been demonstrated in a variety of applications and fields, from signal processing to statistical inference and machine learning. However, the statistical properties of these…
Moving beyond traditional surveys, combining heterogeneous data sources with AI-driven inference models brings new opportunities to measure socio-economic conditions, such as poverty and population, over expansive geographic areas. The…
The prominent inequality of wealth and income is a huge concern especially in the United States. The likelihood of diminishing poverty is one valid reason to reduce the world's surging level of economic inequality. The principle of…
Given a dataset of careers and incomes, how large a difference of income between any pair of careers would be? Given a dataset of travel time records, how long do we need to spend more when choosing a public transportation mode $A$ instead…
Understanding regional Consumer Price Index (CPI) dynamics is essential for timely and effective economic policymaking. However, traditional modeling procedures typically rely only on parametric panel modeling with low-frequency and…
Deep learning has achieved state-of-the-art performance on several computer vision tasks and domains. Nevertheless, it still has a high computational cost and demands a significant amount of parameters. Such requirements hinder the use in…
The Nested Error Regression Model with High-Dimensional Parameters (NERHDP) is extended to address challenges in small area poverty estimation. A robust and flexible framework is proposed to derive empirical best predictors (EBPs) of small…
Poverty mapping that displays spatial distribution of various poverty indices is most useful to policymakers and researchers when they are disaggregated into small geographic units, such as cities, municipalities or other administrative…
A major challenge in designing efficient statistical supervised learning algorithms is finding representations that perform well not only on available training samples but also on unseen data. While the study of representation learning has…