Related papers: Optimality in Mean Estimation: Beyond Worst-Case, …
The era of big data is coming, and evidence-based medicine is attracting increasing attention to improve decision making in medical practice via integrating evidence from well designed and conducted clinical research. Meta-analysis is a…
The Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is a widely used method for maximum likelihood estimation in models with latent variables. For estimating mixtures of Gaussians, its iteration can be viewed as a soft version of the k-means…
$k$-means clustering is a well-studied problem due to its wide applicability. Unfortunately, there exist strong theoretical limits on the performance of any algorithm for the $k$-means problem on worst-case inputs. To overcome this barrier,…
We study the fundamental problem of estimating the mean of a $d$-dimensional distribution with covariance $\Sigma \preccurlyeq \sigma^2 I_d$ given $n$ samples. When $d = 1$, \cite{catoni} showed an estimator with error $(1+o(1)) \cdot…
In data-driven learning and inference tasks, the high cost of acquiring samples from the target distribution often limits performance. A common strategy to mitigate this challenge is to augment the limited target samples with data from a…
Stochastic optimization problems often involve data distributions that change in reaction to the decision variables. This is the case for example when members of the population respond to a deployed classifier by manipulating their features…
We propose an algorithm for Bayesian functional optimisation - that is, finding the function to optimise a process - guided by experimenter beliefs and intuitions regarding the expected characteristics (length-scale, smoothness, cyclicity…
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…
A novel approach, based on the notion of altruism, is presented to cooperative parameter estimation in a system comprising two information-sharing agents. The underlying assumption is that the overall two-agent scheme can reach desired…
Contextual optimization enhances decision quality by leveraging side information to improve predictions of uncertain parameters. However, existing approaches face significant challenges when dealing with multimodal or mixtures of…
We consider the problem of distributed mean estimation (DME), in which $n$ machines are each given a local $d$-dimensional vector $x_v \in \mathbb{R}^d$, and must cooperate to estimate the mean of their inputs $\mu = \frac 1n\sum_{v = 1}^n…
In this paper, we study the problem of distributed mean estimation with 1-bit communication constraints. We propose a mean estimator that is based on (randomized and sequentially-chosen) interval queries, whose 1-bit outcome indicates…
Non-Gaussian Bayesian filtering is a core problem in stochastic filtering. The difficulty of the problem lies in parameterizing the state estimates. However the existing methods are not able to treat it well. We propose to use power moments…
We consider the Bayesian optimal filtering problem: i.e. estimating some conditional statistics of a latent time-series signal from an observation sequence. Classical approaches often rely on the use of assumed or estimated transition and…
We study linear chance-constrained problems where the coefficients follow a Gaussian mixture distribution. We provide mixed-binary quadratic programs that give inner and outer approximations of the chance constraint based on piecewise…
We study the problem of locally private mean estimation of high-dimensional vectors in the Euclidean ball. Existing algorithms for this problem either incur sub-optimal error or have high communication and/or run-time complexity. We propose…
We study mean estimation for a Gaussian distribution with identity covariance in $\mathbb{R}^d$ under a missing data scheme termed realizable $\epsilon$-contamination model. In this model an adversary can choose a function $r(x)$ between 0…
Gaussian Boson Sampling (GBS), which can be realized with a photonic quantum computing model, perform some special kind of sampling tasks. In [4], we introduced algorithms that use GBS samples to approximate Gaussian expectation problems.…
Due to the highly non-convex nature of large-scale robust parameter estimation, avoiding poor local minima is challenging in real-world applications where input data is contaminated by a large or unknown fraction of outliers. In this paper,…
In this paper, we discuss computational aspects to obtain accurate inferences for the parameters of the generalized gamma (GG) distribution. Usually, the solution of the maximum likelihood estimators (MLE) for the GG distribution have no…