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We consider an infinite-dimensional stochastic clustering model on $\mathbb{R}$. In discrete time, each point of a unit-intensity simple point process moves halfway toward either of its left or right neighbors, chosen uniformly at random.…
Component-wise gradient boosting algorithms are popular for their intrinsic variable selection and implicit regularization, which can be especially beneficial for very flexible model classes. When estimating generalized additive models for…
Infinite population models are important tools for studying population dynamics of evolutionary algorithms. They describe how the distributions of populations change between consecutive generations. In general, infinite population models…
Explainable boosting machines (EBMs) are popular "glass-box" models that learn a set of univariate functions using boosting trees. These achieve explainability through visualizations of each feature's effect. However, unlike linear model…
Gradient boosted decision trees are some of the most popular algorithms in applied machine learning. They are a flexible and powerful tool that can robustly fit to any tabular dataset in a scalable and computationally efficient way. One of…
Natural gradient descent is a principled method for adapting the parameters of a statistical model on-line using an underlying Riemannian parameter space to redefine the direction of steepest descent. The algorithm is examined via methods…
This paper studies the infinite-width limit of deep linear neural networks initialized with random parameters. We obtain that, when the number of neurons diverges, the training dynamics converge (in a precise sense) to the dynamics obtained…
We analyze multi-layer neural networks in the asymptotic regime of simultaneously (A) large network sizes and (B) large numbers of stochastic gradient descent training iterations. We rigorously establish the limiting behavior of the…
This work theoretically studies stochastic neural networks, a main type of neural network in use. We prove that as the width of an optimized stochastic neural network tends to infinity, its predictive variance on the training set decreases…
Fitting neural networks often resorts to stochastic (or similar) gradient descent which is a noise-tolerant (and efficient) resolution of a gradient descent dynamics. It outputs a sequence of networks parameters, which sequence evolves…
Statistical Inference is the process of determining a probability distribution over the space of parameters of a model given a data set. As more data becomes available this probability distribution becomes updated via the application of…
This paper examines a novel gradient boosting framework for regression. We regularize gradient boosted trees by introducing subsampling and employ a modified shrinkage algorithm so that at every boosting stage the estimate is given by an…
A framework previously introduced in [3] for solving a sequence of stochastic optimization problems with bounded changes in the minimizers is extended and applied to machine learning problems such as regression and classification. The…
Maximum entropy models provide the least constrained probability distributions that reproduce statistical properties of experimental datasets. In this work we characterize the learning dynamics that maximizes the log-likelihood in the case…
Gradient Boosting Decision Trees (GBDTs) dominate tabular machine learning, with modern implementations like XGBoost, LightGBM, and CatBoost being based on Newton boosting: a second-order descent step in the space of decision trees. Despite…
Multicalibration gradient boosting has recently emerged as a scalable method that empirically produces approximately multicalibrated predictors and has been deployed at web scale. Despite this empirical success, its convergence properties…
The tuning of stochastic gradient algorithms (SGAs) for optimization and sampling is often based on heuristics and trial-and-error rather than generalizable theory. We address this theory--practice gap by characterizing the large-sample…
Although traditional optimization methods focus on finding a single optimal solution, most objective functions in modern machine learning problems, especially those in deep learning, often have multiple or infinite numbers of optima.…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with mini-batching is a standard tool in large-scale optimization, yet its theoretical properties under heavy-tailed gradient noise remain largely unexplored. In this paper we study SGD with increasing…
Many single-target regression problems require estimates of uncertainty along with the point predictions. Probabilistic regression algorithms are well-suited for these tasks. However, the options are much more limited when the prediction…