Related papers: A Polynomial Time Algorithm for Log-Concave Maximu…
Classically, the continuous-time Langevin diffusion converges exponentially fast to its stationary distribution $\pi$ under the sole assumption that $\pi$ satisfies a Poincar\'e inequality. Using this fact to provide guarantees for the…
We design a new, fast algorithm for agnostically learning univariate probability distributions whose densities are well approximated by piecewise polynomial functions. Let $f$ be the density function of an arbitrary univariate distribution,…
This paper presents a new Metropolis-adjusted Langevin algorithm (MALA) that uses convex analysis to simulate efficiently from high-dimensional densities that are log-concave, a class of probability distributions that is widely used in…
Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) requires to evaluate the full data likelihood at different parameter values iteratively and is often computationally infeasible for large data sets. In this paper, we propose to approximate the log-likelihood…
Sampling from a high-dimensional distribution is a fundamental task in statistics, engineering, and the sciences. A canonical approach is the Langevin Algorithm, i.e., the Markov chain for the discretized Langevin Diffusion. This is the…
We give a deterministic polynomial time $2^{O(r)}$-approximation algorithm for the number of bases of a given matroid of rank $r$ and the number of common bases of any two matroids of rank $r$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the…
We study the problem of multiway number partition optimization, which has a myriad of applications in the decision, learning and optimization literature. Even though the original multiway partitioning problem is NP-hard and requires…
The $\lambda$-exponential family generalizes the standard exponential family via a generalized convex duality motivated by optimal transport. It is the constant-curvature analogue of the exponential family from the information-geometric…
This paper studies the distributed optimization problem with possibly nonidentical local constraints, where its global objective function is composed of $N$ convex functions. The aim is to solve the considered optimization problem in a…
We study an optimization problem in which the objective is given as a sum of logarithmic-polynomial functions. This formulation is motivated by statistical estimation principles such as maximum likelihood estimation, and by loss functions…
We develop an algorithmic theory of convex optimization over discrete sets. Using a combination of algebraic and geometric tools we are able to provide polynomial time algorithms for solving broad classes of convex combinatorial…
Here, we give an algorithm for deciding if the nonnegative rank of a matrix $M$ of dimension $m \times n$ is at most $r$ which runs in time $(nm)^{O(r^2)}$. This is the first exact algorithm that runs in time singly-exponential in $r$. This…
Estimating symmetric properties of a distribution, e.g. support size, coverage, entropy, distance to uniformity, are among the most fundamental problems in algorithmic statistics. While each of these properties have been studied extensively…
We study the problem of estimating multivariate log-concave probability density functions. We prove the first sample complexity upper bound for learning log-concave densities on $\mathbb{R}^d$, for all $d \geq 1$. Prior to our work, no…
We study the problem of minimizing a nonnegative separable concave function over a compact feasible set. We approximate this problem to within a factor of 1+epsilon by a piecewise-linear minimization problem over the same feasible set. Our…
Gradient-based (a.k.a. `first order') optimization algorithms are routinely used to solve large scale non-convex problems. Yet, it is generally hard to predict their effectiveness. In order to gain insight into this question, we revisit the…
We give a polynomial-time algorithm for learning high-dimensional halfspaces with margins in $d$-dimensional space to within desired TV distance when the ambient distribution is an unknown affine transformation of the $d$-fold product of an…
We consider a class of popular distributed non-convex optimization problems, in which agents connected by a network $\mathcal{G}$ collectively optimize a sum of smooth (possibly non-convex) local objective functions. We address the…
We propose using a discounted version of a convex combination of the log-likelihood with the corresponding expected log-likelihood such that when they are maximized they yield a filter, predictor and smoother for time series. This paper…
Stochastic approximation methods play a central role in maximum likelihood estimation problems involving intractable likelihood functions, such as marginal likelihoods arising in problems with missing or incomplete data, and in parametric…