Related papers: Rethinking Factor Loading Thresholds: A Case for a…
In many scientific disciplines, the features of interest cannot be observed directly, so must instead be inferred from observed behaviour. Latent variable analyses are increasingly employed to systematise these inferences, and Principal…
The Matrix Factorization models, sometimes called the latent factor models, are a family of methods in the recommender system research area to (1) generate the latent factors for the users and the items and (2) predict users' ratings on…
Importance weighted variational inference (Burda et al., 2015) uses multiple i.i.d. samples to have a tighter variational lower bound. We believe a joint proposal has the potential of reducing the number of redundant samples, and introduce…
Standard inference about a scalar parameter estimated via GMM amounts to applying a t-test to a particular set of observations. If the number of observations is not very large, then moderately heavy tails can lead to poor behavior of the…
High quality annotations are increasingly a bottleneck in the explosively growing machine learning ecosystem. Scalable evaluation methods that avoid costly annotation have therefore become an important research ambition. Many hope to use…
In this paper, we generalize the upper bound in Varadhan's Lemma. The standard formulation of Varadhan's Lemma contains two important elements, namely an upper semicontinuous integrand and a rate function with compact sublevel sets.…
Classical measures of structural reliability, such as the probability of failure and the related reliability index, are still widely applied in practice. However, these measures are frequency-based only, and they do not give information…
Causal inference with observational studies often relies on the assumptions of unconfoundedness and overlap of covariate distributions in different treatment groups. The overlap assumption is violated when some units have propensity scores…
Many existing mortality models follow the framework of classical factor models, such as the Lee-Carter model and its variants. Latent common factors in factor models are defined as time-related mortality indices (such as $\kappa_t$ in the…
When the experimental objective is expressed by a set of estimable functions, and any eigenvalue-based optimality criterion is selected, we prove the equivalence of the recently introduced weighted optimality and the 'standard' optimality…
We identify the critical deviation scale governing Bayesian evidence accumulation in regular parametric testing. Under integrated Bayes risk with zero-one loss, the risk-optimal rejection boundary lies in a moderate deviation regime, with a…
The rejection threshold used for e-values and e-processes is by default set to $1/\alpha$ for a guaranteed type-I error control at $\alpha$, based on Markov's and Ville's inequalities. This threshold can be wasteful in practical…
LLM-as-a-Judge pipelines have become the de facto evaluator for agent safety, yet existing benchmarks treat their verdicts as ground-truth proxies without checking whether the verdicts depend on the agent's behavior or merely on how the…
Let $X$ be a set of items of size $n$ , which may contain some defective items denoted by $I$, where $I \subseteq X$. In group testing, a {\it test} refers to a subset of items $Q \subset X$. The test outcome is $1$ (positive) if $Q$…
Factor analysis is a classical data reduction technique that seeks a potentially lower number of unobserved variables that can account for the correlations among the observed variables. This paper presents an extension of the factor…
Latent or unobserved phenomena pose a significant difficulty in data analysis as they induce complicated and confounding dependencies among a collection of observed variables. Factor analysis is a prominent multivariate statistical modeling…
We introduce a novel approach to finite sample robustness that avoids the pessimism of traditional breakdown analyses. We define the threshold breakdown point, the smallest contamination fraction needed to induce a prescribed deviation, and…
Recently, it was shown that most popular IR measures are not interval-scaled, implying that decades of experimental IR research used potentially improper methods, which may have produced questionable results. However, it was unclear if and…
Millions of measuring instruments are verified each year before being placed on the markets worldwide. In the EU, such initial conformity assessments are regulated by the Measuring Instruments Directive (MID). The MID modules F and F1 on…
This paper studies the principal component (PC) method-based estimation of weak factor models with sparse loadings. We uncover an intrinsic near-sparsity preservation property for the PC estimators of loadings, which comes from the…