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We investigate the problem of continuous-time causal estimation under a minimax criterion. Let $X^T = \{X_t,0\leq t\leq T\}$ be governed by the probability law $P_{\theta}$ from a class of possible laws indexed by $\theta \in \Lambda$, and…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2014-07-09 Albert No , Tsachy Weissman

The expected improvement (EI) is one of the most popular acquisition functions for Bayesian optimization (BO) and has demonstrated good empirical performances in many applications for the minimization of simple regret. However, under the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Shouri Hu , Haowei Wang , Zhongxiang Dai , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low , Szu Hui Ng

In practical applications, data is used to make decisions in two steps: estimation and optimization. First, a machine learning model estimates parameters for a structural model relating decisions to outcomes. Second, a decision is chosen to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-28 Samuel Tan , Peter I. Frazier

Bayesian optimisation is a popular method for efficient optimisation of expensive black-box functions. Traditionally, BO assumes that the search space is known. However, in many problems, this assumption does not hold. To this end, we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-28 Hung Tran-The , Sunil Gupta , Santu Rana , Huong Ha , Svetha Venkatesh

This paper studies the sparse normal mean models under the empirical Bayes framework. We focus on the mixture priors with an atom at zero and a density component centered at a data driven location determined by maximizing the marginal…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-02-20 Xianyang Zhang , Anirban Bhattacharya

We study the sequential general online regression, known also as the sequential probability assignments, under logarithmic loss when compared against a broad class of experts. We focus on obtaining tight, often matching, lower and upper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-02 Changlong Wu , Mohsen Heidari , Ananth Grama , Wojciech Szpankowski

This work applies modern AI tools (transformers) to solving one of the oldest statistical problems: Poisson means under empirical Bayes (Poisson-EB) setting. In Poisson-EB a high-dimensional mean vector $\theta$ (with iid coordinates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Anzo Teh , Mark Jabbour , Yury Polyanskiy

We identify the critical deviation scale governing Bayesian evidence accumulation in regular parametric testing. Under integrated Bayes risk with zero-one loss, the risk-optimal rejection boundary lies in a moderate deviation regime, with a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-03-23 Jyotishka Datta , Nicholas G. Polson , Vadim Sokolov , Daniel Zantedeschi

The goal of this paper is to characterize Gaussian-Process optimization in the setting where the function domain is large relative to the number of admissible function evaluations, i.e., where it is impossible to find the global optimum. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-26 Manuel Wüthrich , Bernhard Schölkopf , Andreas Krause

The Poisson compound decision problem is a long-standing problem in statistics, where empirical Bayes methodologies are commonly used to estimate Poisson's means in static or batch domains. In this paper, we study the Poisson compound…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-06-10 Stefano Favaro , Sandra Fortini

This paper considers the use of a simple posterior sampling algorithm to balance between exploration and exploitation when learning to optimize actions such as in multi-armed bandit problems. The algorithm, also known as Thompson Sampling,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-02-04 Daniel Russo , Benjamin Van Roy

An empirical Bayes approach to the estimation of possibly sparse sequences observed in Gaussian white noise is set out and investigated. The prior considered is a mixture of an atom of probability at zero and a heavy-tailed density \gamma,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2007-06-13 Iain M. Johnstone , Bernard W. Silverman

This work focuses on Bayesian optimization (BO) under reward model uncertainty. We propose the first BO algorithm that achieves no-regret guarantee in a general reward setting, requiring only Lipschitz continuity of the objective function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Zishi Zhang , Tao Ren , Yijie Peng

Bayesian optimization is a popular framework for efficiently tackling black-box search problems. As a rule, these algorithms operate by iteratively choosing what to evaluate next until some predefined budget has been exhausted. We…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-12 James T. Wilson

The celebrated Bernstein von-Mises theorem ensures that credible regions from Bayesian posterior are well-calibrated when the model is correctly-specified, in the frequentist sense that their coverage probabilities tend to the nominal…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-09-17 Rong Tang , Yun Yang

We consider Bayesian optimization using Gaussian Process models, also referred to as kernel-based bandit optimization. We study the methodology of exploring the domain using random samples drawn from a distribution. We show that this random…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-05 Sudeep Salgia , Sattar Vakili , Qing Zhao

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular method for black-box optimization, which relies on uncertainty as part of its decision-making process when deciding which experiment to perform next. However, not much work has addressed the effect of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-18 Jonathan Foldager , Mikkel Jordahn , Lars Kai Hansen , Michael Riis Andersen

Gaussian process upper confidence bound (GP-UCB) is a theoretically established algorithm for Bayesian optimization (BO), where we assume the objective function $f$ follows a GP. One notable drawback of GP-UCB is that the theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Shion Takeno , Yu Inatsu , Masayuki Karasuyama

We present a new algorithm based on posterior sampling for learning in Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDP) in the infinite-horizon undiscounted setting. The algorithm achieves near-optimal regret bounds while being advantageous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Danil Provodin , Maurits Kaptein , Mykola Pechenizkiy

Although Bayesian inference is an immensely popular paradigm among a large segment of scientists including statisticians, most applications consider objective priors and need critical investigations (Efron, 2013, Science). While it has…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-09-11 Abhik Ghosh , Tuhin Majumder , Ayanendranath Basu