Related papers: Surprise sampling: improving and extending the loc…
Social scientists often study how a policy reform impacted a single targeted country. Increasingly, this is done with the synthetic control method (SCM). SCM models the country's counterfactual (non-reform or untreated) trajectory as a…
The Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) method has been recognized as a powerful sampling tool in computational statistics. We show that performance of HMC can be significantly improved by incorporating importance sampling and an irreversible…
Sampling is a popular method for approximate inference when exact inference is impractical. Generally, sampling algorithms do not exploit context-specific independence (CSI) properties of probability distributions. We introduce…
Online reinforcement learning and other adaptive sampling algorithms are increasingly used in digital intervention experiments to optimize treatment delivery for users over time. In this work, we focus on longitudinal user data collected by…
We present a novel sampling framework for probabilistic programs. The framework combines two recent ideas -- \emph{control-data separation} and \emph{logical condition propagation} -- in a nontrivial manner so that the two ideas boost the…
We consider a measurement constrained supervised learning problem, that is, (1) full sample of the predictors are given; (2) the response observations are unavailable and expensive to measure. Thus, it is ideal to select a subsample of…
Optimization problems with the objective function in the form of weighted sum and linear equality constraints are considered. Given that the number of local cost functions can be large as well as the number of constraints, a stochastic…
We consider the problem of unconstrained minimization of a smooth objective function in $\R^n$ in a setting where only function evaluations are possible. While importance sampling is one of the most popular techniques used by machine…
Bayesian inference with Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is challenging when the likelihood function is irregular and expensive to compute. We explore several sampling algorithms that make use of subset evaluations to reduce computational…
We investigate Learning from Label Proportions (LLP), a partial information setting where examples in a training set are grouped into bags, and only aggregate label values in each bag are available. Despite the partial observability, the…
This tutorial survey provides an overview of recent non-asymptotic advances in statistical learning theory as relevant to control and system identification. While there has been substantial progress across all areas of control, the theory…
This paper presents a stochastic model predictive control approach for nonlinear systems subject to time-invariant probabilistic uncertainties in model parameters and initial conditions. The stochastic optimal control problem entails a cost…
Bayesian hierarchical models have been demonstrated to provide efficient algorithms for finding sparse solutions to ill-posed inverse problems. The models comprise typically a conditionally Gaussian prior model for the unknown, augmented by…
The Big Data revolution is challenging the state-of-the-art statistical and econometric techniques not only for the computational burden connected with the high volume and speed which data are generated, but even more for the variety of…
In probability theory and statistics, the IID model represents a single population, and a large, potentially infinite sample from this population. Main theorems, in particular the central limit theorem and laws of large number (LLN) assure…
Choosing the optimization algorithm that performs best on a given machine learning problem is often delicate, and there is no guarantee that current state-of-the-art algorithms will perform well across all tasks. Consequently, the more…
Statistical sufficiency formalizes the notion of data reduction. In the decision theoretic interpretation, once a model is chosen all inferences should be based on a sufficient statistic. However, suppose we start with a set of procedures…
Model Predictive Control (MPC) offers rigorous safety and performance guarantees but is computationally intensive. Approximate MPC (AMPC) aims to circumvent this drawback by learning a computationally cheaper surrogate policy. Common…
The problem of sampling constrained continuous distributions has frequently appeared in many machine/statistical learning models. Many Monte Carlo Markov Chain (MCMC) sampling methods have been adapted to handle different types of…
Learning from imbalanced data is a challenging task. Standard classification algorithms tend to perform poorly when trained on imbalanced data. Some special strategies need to be adopted, either by modifying the data distribution or by…