Related papers: An Upper Confidence Bound Approach to Estimating t…

Concentration inequalities for the sample mean, like those due to Bernstein, Hoeffding, and Bentkus, are valid for any sample size but overly conservative, yielding confidence intervals that are unnecessarily wide. The central limit theorem…

We present ML-UCB, a generalized upper confidence bound algorithm that integrates arbitrary machine learning models into multi-armed bandit frameworks. A fundamental challenge in deploying sophisticated ML models for sequential…

An automatic machine learning (AutoML) task is to select the best algorithm and its hyper-parameters simultaneously. Previously, the hyper-parameters of all algorithms are joint as a single search space, which is not only huge but also…

Despite their widespread applications, Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle to express uncertainty, posing a challenge for reliable deployment in high stakes and safety critical domains like clinical diagnostics. Existing standard…

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…

Many real-world optimization problems involve an expensive ground-truth oracle (e.g., human evaluation, physical experiments) and a cheap, low-fidelity prediction oracle (e.g., machine learning models, simulations). Meanwhile, abundant…

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has dramatically advanced the state-of-the-art in numerous natural language generation tasks. For LLMs to be applied reliably, it is essential to have an accurate measure of their confidence.…

In order to improve the performance of Bayesian optimisation, we develop a modified Gaussian process upper confidence bound (GP-UCB) acquisition function. This is done by sampling the exploration-exploitation trade-off parameter from a…

In numerous regular statistical models, median bias reduction (Kenne Pagui et al., 2017) has proven to be a noteworthy improvement over maximum likelihood, alternative to mean bias reduction. The estimator is obtained as solution to a…

This paper is devoted to the estimators of the mean that provide strong non-asymptotic guarantees under minimal assumptions on the underlying distribution. The main ideas behind proposed techniques are based on bridging the notions of…

This paper addresses the Bayesian optimization problem (also referred to as the Bayesian setting of the Gaussian process bandit), where the learner seeks to minimize the regret under a function drawn from a known Gaussian process (GP).…

The batch means estimator of the MCMC variance is a simple and effective measure of accuracy for MCMC based ergodic averages. Under various regularity conditions, the estimator has been shown to be consistent for the true variance. However,…

We consider the problem of contextual bandits with stochastic experts, which is a variation of the traditional stochastic contextual bandit with experts problem. In our problem setting, we assume access to a class of stochastic experts,…

The regret lower bound of Lai and Robbins (1985), the gold standard for checking optimality of bandit algorithms, considers arm size fixed as sample size goes to infinity. We show that when arm size increases polynomially with sample size,…

This paper deals with subspace estimation in the small sample size regime, where the number of samples is comparable in magnitude with the observation dimension. The traditional estimators, mostly based on the sample correlation matrix, are…

In this paper, we study a stochastic strongly convex optimization problem and propose three classes of variable sample-size stochastic first-order methods including the standard stochastic gradient descent method, its accelerated variant,…

We consider the problem of controlling an unknown stochastic linear system with quadratic costs - called the adaptive LQ control problem. We re-examine an approach called ''Reward Biased Maximum Likelihood Estimate'' (RBMLE) that was…

Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown great advances in a variety of tasks, including natural language understanding and generation. However, their use in high-stakes decision-making scenarios is still limited due to the…

Sample-average approximations (SAA) are a practical means of finding approximate solutions of stochastic programming problems involving an extremely large (or infinite) number of scenarios. SAA can also be used to find estimates of a lower…

Large language models (LLMs) have been proposed as alternatives to human experts for estimating unknown quantities with associated uncertainty, a process known as Bayesian elicitation. We test this by asking eleven LLMs to estimate…