Related papers: How good is Good-Turing for Markov samples?
A random variable is sampled from a discrete distribution. The missing mass is the probability of the set of points not observed in the sample. We sharpen and simplify McAllester and Ortiz's results (JMLR, 2003) bounding the probability of…
Graphs are commonly used to model various complex systems, including social networks, power grids, transportation networks, and biological systems. In many applications, the connectivity of these networks can be expressed through the Mean…
We consider the problem of estimating the asymptotic variance of a function defined on a Markov chain, an important step for statistical inference of the stationary mean. We design a novel recursive estimator that requires $O(1)$…
A theory of systems with long-range correlations based on the consideration of binary N-step Markov chains is developed. In the model, the conditional probability that the i-th symbol in the chain equals zero (or unity) is a linear function…
We study the problem of estimating a distribution over a finite alphabet from an i.i.d. sample, with accuracy measured in relative entropy (Kullback-Leibler divergence). While optimal bounds on the expected risk are known, high-probability…
The basic question in perturbation analysis of Markov chains is: how do small changes in the transition kernels of Markov chains translate to chains in their stationary distributions? Many papers on the subject have shown, roughly, that the…
This paper introduces a novel error estimator for the Proper Generalized Decomposition (PGD) approximation of parametrized equations. The estimator is intrinsically random: It builds on concentration inequalities of Gaussian maps and an…
We revisit the problem of estimating the mean of a real-valued distribution, presenting a novel estimator with sub-Gaussian convergence: intuitively, "our estimator, on any distribution, is as accurate as the sample mean is for the Gaussian…
The following learning problem arises naturally in various applications: Given a finite sample from a categorical or count time series, can we learn a function of the sample that (nearly) maximizes the probability of correctly guessing the…
Gibbs sampling is a Markov chain Monte Carlo method that is often used for learning and inference on graphical models. Minibatching, in which a small random subset of the graph is used at each iteration, can help make Gibbs sampling scale…
In an influential paper, Courtois and Semal (1984) establish that when $G$ is an irreducible substochastic matrix for which $\sum_{n=0}^{\infty}G^n <\infty$, then the stationary distribution of any stochastic matrix $P\ge G$ can be…
We consider the problem of closeness testing for two discrete distributions in the practically relevant setting of \emph{unequal} sized samples drawn from each of them. Specifically, given a target error parameter $\varepsilon > 0$, $m_1$…
Quantifying convergence and sufficient sampling of macromolecular molecular dynamics simulations is more often than not a source of controversy (and of various ad hoc solutions) in the field. Clearly, the only reasonable, consistent and…
Gradient information on the sampling distribution can be used to reduce the variance of Monte Carlo estimators via Stein's method. An important application is that of estimating an expectation of a test function along the sample path of a…
A sample covariance matrix $\boldsymbol{S}$ of completely observed data is the key statistic in a large variety of multivariate statistical procedures, such as structured covariance/precision matrix estimation, principal component analysis,…
We consider the problem of model selection in Gaussian Markov fields in the sample deficient scenario. In many practically important cases, the underlying networks are embedded into Euclidean spaces. Using the natural geometric structure,…
Understanding the stability and long-time behavior of generative models is a fundamental problem in modern machine learning. This paper provides quantitative bounds on the sampling error of score-based generative models by leveraging…
The insurance model when the amount of claims depends on the state of the insured person (healthy, ill, or dead) and claims are connected in a Markov chain is investigated. The signed compound Poisson approximation is applied to the…
This paper studies the limiting behavior of Tyler's M-estimator for the scatter matrix, in the regime that the number of samples $n$ and their dimension $p$ both go to infinity, and $p/n$ converges to a constant $y$ with $0<y<1$. We prove…
This paper is devoted to the convergence analysis of stochastic approximation algorithms of the form $\theta\_{n+1} = \theta\_n + \gamma\_{n+1} H\_{\theta\_n}(X\_{n+1})$ where $\{\theta\_nn, n \geq 0\}$ is a $R^d$-valued sequence,…