Related papers: On the Estimation of Multinomial Logit and Nested …

The computation of the maximum likelihood (ML) estimator for heteroscedastic regression models is considered. The traditional Newton algorithms for the problem require matrix multiplications and inversions, which are bottlenecks in modern…

Parallel stochastic gradient methods are gaining prominence in solving large-scale machine learning problems that involve data distributed across multiple nodes. However, obtaining unbiased stochastic gradients, which have been the focus of…

Non-convex optimization problems are pervasive across mathematical programming, engineering design, and scientific computing, often posing intractable challenges for traditional solvers due to their complex objective functions and…

The methods of statistical physics are widely used for modelling complex networks. Building on the recently proposed Equilibrium Expectation approach, we derive a simple and efficient algorithm for maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) of…

We study the problem of maximum likelihood estimation of densities that are log-concave and lie in the graphical model corresponding to a given undirected graph $G$. We show that the maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) is the product of the…

We study a stylized dynamic assortment planning problem during a selling season of finite length $T$. At each time period, the seller offers an arriving customer an assortment of substitutable products and the customer makes the purchase…

Variational inference methods have been shown to lead to significant improvements in the computational efficiency of approximate Bayesian inference in mixed multinomial logit models when compared to standard Markov-chain Monte Carlo (MCMC)…

Conventional methods for computing maximum-likelihood estimators (MLE) often converge slowly in practical situations, leading to a search for simplifying methods that rely on additional assumptions for their validity. In this work, we…

We consider stochastic optimization when one only has access to biased stochastic oracles of the objective and the gradient, and obtaining stochastic gradients with low biases comes at high costs. This setting captures various optimization…

Nonnegative matrix factorization is the following problem: given a nonnegative input matrix $V$ and a factorization rank $K$, compute two nonnegative matrices, $W$ with $K$ columns and $H$ with $K$ rows, such that $WH$ approximates $V$ as…

Although well-established in general reinforcement learning (RL), value-based methods are rarely explored in constrained RL (CRL) for their incapability of finding policies that can randomize among multiple actions. To apply value-based…

Optimization problems involving sequential decisions in a stochastic environment were studied in Stochastic Programming (SP), Stochastic Optimal Control (SOC) and Markov Decision Processes (MDP). In this paper we mainly concentrate on SP…

Temporal Point Processes (TPP) with partial likelihoods involving a latent structure often entail an intractable marginalization, thus making inference hard. We propose a novel approach to Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) involving…

We investigate the optimization landscape of maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) for the Cavender-Farris-Neyman (CFN) model, a two-state latent tree model fundamental to statistical phylogenetics and the ferromagnetic Ising model. Although…

Maximum likelihood estimators (MLE) and control variate estimators (CVE) have been used in conjunction with known information across sketching algorithms and applications in machine learning. We prove that under certain conditions in an…

In this paper, we consider a multi-stage dynamic assortment optimization problem with multi-nomial choice modeling (MNL) under resource knapsack constraints. Given the current resource inventory levels, the retailer makes an assortment…

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,…

This paper explores the adaptive (active) PAC (probably approximately correct) top-$k$ ranking (i.e., top-$k$ item selection) and total ranking problems from $l$-wise ($l\geq 2$) comparisons under the multinomial logit (MNL) model. By…

We consider solving equality-constrained nonlinear, nonconvex optimization problems. This class of problems appears widely in a variety of applications in machine learning and engineering, ranging from constrained deep neural networks, to…

This paper studies optimization for a family of problems termed $\textbf{compositional entropic risk minimization}$, in which each data's loss is formulated as a Log-Expectation-Exponential (Log-E-Exp) function. The Log-E-Exp formulation…