English
Related papers

Related papers: Sequential Mode Estimation with Oracle Queries

200 papers

In this paper, we study the problem of distributed mean estimation with 1-bit communication constraints. We propose a mean estimator that is based on (randomized and sequentially-chosen) interval queries, whose 1-bit outcome indicates…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-07 Ivan Lau , Jonathan Scarlett

Decision-making problems often feature uncertainty stemming from heterogeneous and context-dependent human preferences. To address this, we propose a sequential learning-and-optimization pipeline to learn preference distributions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Benjamin Hudson , Laurent Charlin , Emma Frejinger

Probabilistic modeling is cyclical: we specify a model, infer its posterior, and evaluate its performance. Evaluation drives the cycle, as we revise our model based on how it performs. This requires a metric. Traditionally, predictive…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-05-25 Alp Kucukelbir , David M. Blei

A standard approach in pattern classification is to estimate the distributions of the label classes, and then to apply the Bayes classifier to the estimates of the distributions in order to classify unlabeled examples. As one might expect,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Nick Palmer , Paul W. Goldberg

Clinical decision-making often involves selecting tests that are costly, invasive, or time-consuming, motivating individualized, sequential strategies for what to measure and when to stop ascertaining. We study the problem of learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-16 Doudou Zhou , Yiran Zhang , Dian Jin , Yingye Zheng , Lu Tian , Tianxi Cai

We investigate distribution testing with access to non-adaptive conditional samples. In the conditional sampling model, the algorithm is given the following access to a distribution: it submits a query set $S$ to an oracle, which returns a…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-11-06 Gautam Kamath , Christos Tzamos

Several well-studied models of access to data samples, including statistical queries, local differential privacy and low-communication algorithms rely on queries that provide information about a function of a single sample. (For example, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-02 Vitaly Feldman , Badih Ghazi

Neural marked temporal point processes have been a valuable addition to the existing toolbox of statistical parametric models for continuous-time event data. These models are useful for sequences where each event is associated with a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-20 Yuxin Chang , Alex Boyd , Padhraic Smyth

The problem of searching for a model-based scene interpretation is analyzed within a probabilistic framework. Object models are formulated as generative models for range data of the scene. A new statistical criterion, the truncated object…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Ulrich Hillenbrand , Gerd Hirzinger

We consider a step search method for continuous optimization under a stochastic setting where the function values and gradients are available only through inexact probabilistic zeroth- and first-order oracles. Unlike the stochastic gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-03 Billy Jin , Katya Scheinberg , Miaolan Xie

Query workloads and database schemas in OLAP applications are becoming increasingly complex. Moreover, the queries and the schemas have to continually \textit{evolve} to address business requirements. During such repetitive transitions, the…

Databases · Computer Science 2015-03-19 Hideaki Kimura , Carleton Coffrin , Alexander Rasin , Stanley B. Zdonik

We introduce a novel technique for verification and model synthesis of sequential programs. Our technique is based on learning a regular model of the set of feasible paths in a program, and testing whether this model contains an incorrect…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2015-11-04 Yu-Fang Chen , Chiao Hsieh , Ondřej Lengál , Tsung-Ju Lii , Ming-Hsien Tsai , Bow-Yaw Wang , Farn Wang

We study a new framework for property testing of probability distributions, by considering distribution testing algorithms that have access to a conditional sampling oracle.* This is an oracle that takes as input a subset $S \subseteq [N]$…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2015-01-19 Clement Canonne , Dana Ron , Rocco A. Servedio

In this work, we revisit the problem of active sequential prediction-powered mean estimation, where at each round one must decide the query probability of the ground-truth label upon observing the covariates of a sample. Furthermore, if the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-21 Maria-Eleni Sfyraki , Jun-Kun Wang

We address the new problem of estimating a piece-wise constant signal with the purpose of detecting its change points and the levels of clusters. Our approach is to model it as a nonparametric penalized least square model selection on a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-04 Othmane Mazhar , Cristian R. Rojas , Carlo Fischione , Mohammad R. Hesamzadeh

Several classical adaptive optimization algorithms, such as line search and trust region methods, have been recently extended to stochastic settings where function values, gradients, and Hessians in some cases, are estimated via stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-02 Billy Jin , Katya Scheinberg , Miaolan Xie

One of the popular measures of central tendency that provides better representation and interesting insights of the data compared to the other measures like mean and median is the metric mode. If the analytical form of the density function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-04 Chandramouli Kamanchi , Raghuram Bharadwaj Diddigi , Prabuchandran K. J. , Shalabh Bhatnagar

We consider the problem of PAC-learning decision trees, i.e., learning a decision tree over the n-dimensional hypercube from independent random labeled examples. Despite significant effort, no polynomial-time algorithm is known for learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2008-12-05 Adam Tauman Kalai , Shang-Hua Teng

Continuous-time event sequences, i.e., sequences consisting of continuous time stamps and associated event types ("marks"), are an important type of sequential data with many applications, e.g., in clinical medicine or user behavior…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-11-17 Alex Boyd , Yuxin Chang , Stephan Mandt , Padhraic Smyth

A conditional sampling oracle for a probability distribution D returns samples from the conditional distribution of D restricted to a specified subset of the domain. A recent line of work (Chakraborty et al. 2013 and Cannone et al. 2014)…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2016-08-18 Themistoklis Gouleakis , Christos Tzamos , Manolis Zampetakis