Related papers: Robust estimation of the mean with bounded relativ…
In this paper we study algorithms to find a Gaussian approximation to a target measure defined on a Hilbert space of functions; the target measure itself is defined via its density with respect to a reference Gaussian measure. We employ the…
Distributed algorithms for solving additive or consensus optimization problems commonly rely on first-order or proximal splitting methods. These algorithms generally come with restrictive assumptions and at best enjoy a linear convergence…
We introduce deterministic perturbation schemes for the recently proposed random directions stochastic approximation (RDSA) [17], and propose new first-order and second-order algorithms. In the latter case, these are the first second-order…
Hard optimization problems are often approached by finding approximate solutions. Here, we highlight the concept of proportional sampling and discuss how it can be used to improve the performance of stochastic algorithms for optimization.…
An algorithm is proposed, analyzed, and tested for solving continuous nonlinear-equality-constrained optimization problems where the objective and constraint functions are defined by expectations or averages over large, finite numbers of…
We study the problem of robustly estimating the mean of a $d$-dimensional distribution given $N$ examples, where most coordinates of every example may be missing and $\varepsilon N$ examples may be arbitrarily corrupted. Assuming each…
Finding a maximum cut is a fundamental task in many computational settings. Surprisingly, it has been insufficiently studied in the classic distributed settings, where vertices communicate by synchronously sending messages to their…
Suppose that $X_1,X_2,\ldots$ are a stream of independent, identically distributed Poisson random variables with mean $\mu$. This work presents a new estimate $\mu_k$ for $\mu$ with the property that the distribution of the relative error…
We consider the problem of robust polynomial regression, where one receives samples $(x_i, y_i)$ that are usually within $\sigma$ of a polynomial $y = p(x)$, but have a $\rho$ chance of being arbitrary adversarial outliers. Previously, it…
We present a new algorithm for estimating the star discrepancy of arbitrary point sets. Similar to the algorithm for discrepancy approximation of Winker and Fang [SIAM J. Numer. Anal. 34 (1997), 2028--2042] it is based on the optimization…
We consider the problem of minimizing a sum of $n$ functions over a convex parameter set $\mathcal{C} \subset \mathbb{R}^p$ where $n\gg p\gg 1$. In this regime, algorithms which utilize sub-sampling techniques are known to be effective. In…
We propose a stochastic approximation method for approximating the efficient frontier of chance-constrained nonlinear programs. Our approach is based on a bi-objective viewpoint of chance-constrained programs that seeks solutions on the…
Given a linear dynamical system, we consider the problem of constructing an approximate system using only a subset of the sensors out of the total set such that the observability Gramian of the new system is approximately equal to that of…
We design an $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-differentially private algorithm to estimate the mean of a $d$-variate distribution, with unknown covariance $\Sigma$, that is adaptive to $\Sigma$. To within polylogarithmic factors, the estimator…
We consider stochastic settings for clustering, and develop provably-good approximation algorithms for a number of these notions. These algorithms yield better approximation ratios compared to the usual deterministic clustering setting.…
In this paper, we study the problem of estimating uniformly well the mean values of several distributions given a finite budget of samples. If the variance of the distributions were known, one could design an optimal sampling strategy by…
The pseudo-marginal algorithm is a variant of the Metropolis--Hastings algorithm which samples asymptotically from a probability distribution when it is only possible to estimate unbiasedly an unnormalized version of its density.…
This paper focuses on the distributed static estimation problem and a Belief Propagation (BP) based estimation algorithm is proposed. We provide a complete analysis for convergence and accuracy of it. More precisely, we offer conditions…
This paper presents a detailed theoretical analysis of the three stochastic approximation proximal gradient algorithms proposed in our companion paper [49] to set regularization parameters by marginal maximum likelihood estimation. We prove…
We describe two quantum algorithms to approximate the mean value of a black-box function. The first algorithm is novel and asymptotically optimal while the second is a variation on an earlier algorithm due to Aharonov. Both algorithms have…