Related papers: PySDTest: a Python/Stata Package for Stochastic Do…

Recently, the scientific community has questioned the statistical reproducibility of many empirical results, especially in the field of machine learning. To contribute to the resolution of this reproducibility crisis, we propose a…

In pure exploration problems, a statistician sequentially collects information to answer a question about some stochastic and unknown environment. The probability of returning a wrong answer should not exceed a maximum risk parameter…

Probabilistic pushdown automata (pPDA) are a standard model for discrete probabilistic programs with procedures and recursion. In pPDA, many quantitative properties are characterized as least fixpoints of polynomial equation systems. In…

Stochastic multi-objective optimization (SMOOP) requires ranking multivariate distributions; yet, most empirical studies perform scalarization, which loses information and is unreliable. Based on the optimal transport theory, we introduce…

Nested sampling is an increasingly popular technique for Bayesian computation, in particular for multimodal, degenerate problems of moderate to high dimensionality. Without appropriate settings, however, nested sampling software may fail to…

This paper proposes a nonparametric test for $m$th-degree inverse stochastic dominance which is a powerful tool for ranking distribution functions according to social welfare. We construct the test based on empirical process theory. The…

We present analytical investigations of a multiplicative stochastic process that models a simple investor dynamics in a random environment. The dynamics of the investor's budget, $x(t)$, depends on the stochasticity of the return on…

In this paper, we discuss portfolio selection strategies for Enhanced Indexation (EI), which are based on stochastic dominance relations. The goal is to select portfolios that stochastically dominate a given benchmark but that, at the same…

This paper introduces AdaSDCA: an adaptive variant of stochastic dual coordinate ascent (SDCA) for solving the regularized empirical risk minimization problems. Our modification consists in allowing the method adaptively change the…

Dataset distillation is an advanced technique aimed at compressing datasets into significantly smaller counterparts, while preserving formidable training performance. Significant efforts have been devoted to promote evaluation accuracy…

Estimating the parameters governing the dynamics of a system is a prerequisite for its optimal control. We present a simple but powerful method that we call STEADY, for STochastic Estimation algorithm for DYnamical variables, to estimate…

Stochastic policies (also known as relaxed controls) are widely used in continuous-time reinforcement learning algorithms. However, executing a stochastic policy and evaluating its performance in a continuous-time environment remain open…

The stochastic block model is a popular tool for detecting community structures in network data. Detecting the difference between two community structures is an important issue for stochastic block models. However, the two-sample test has…

We are interested in risk constraints for infinite horizon discrete time Markov decision processes (MDPs). Starting with average reward MDPs, we show that increasing concave stochastic dominance constraints on the empirical distribution of…

The probabilistic bisection algorithm (PBA) solves a class of stochastic root-finding problems in one dimension by successively updating a prior belief on the location of the root based on noisy responses to queries at chosen points. The…

Policy gradient (PG) methods are successful approaches to deal with continuous reinforcement learning (RL) problems. They learn stochastic parametric (hyper)policies by either exploring in the space of actions or in the space of parameters.…

This paper introduces a new proximal stochastic gradient method with variance reduction and stabilization for minimizing the sum of a convex stochastic function and a group sparsity-inducing regularization function. Since the method may be…

Determining whether an unknown distribution matches a known reference is a cornerstone problem in distributional analysis. While classical results establish a rigorous framework in the case of distributions over finite domains, real-world…

Stein's method compares probability distributions through the study of a class of linear operators called Stein operators. While mainly studied in probability and used to underpin theoretical statistics, Stein's method has led to…

We introduce a new stochastic order for the tail dependence between random variables. We then study different measures of tail dependence which are monotone in the proposed order, thereby extending various known tail dependence coefficients…