Related papers: Information Acquisition with $\alpha$-Divergence C…
We study the logarithmic $L^{(\alpha)}$-divergence which extrapolates the Bregman divergence and corresponds to solutions to novel optimal transport problems. We show that this logarithmic divergence is equivalent to a conformal…
The asymmetric skew divergence smooths one of the distributions by mixing it, to a degree determined by the parameter $\lambda$, with the other distribution. Such divergence is an approximation of the KL divergence that does not require the…
Given a finite family of functions, the goal of model selection aggregation is to construct a procedure that mimics the function from this family that is the closest to an unknown regression function. More precisely, we consider a general…
Consider the nonparametric logistic regression problem. In the logistic regression, we usually consider the maximum likelihood estimator, and the excess risk is the expectation of the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the true and…
We consider a class of optimization problems over stochastic variables where the algorithm can learn information about the value of any variable through a series of costly steps; we model this information acquisition process as a Markov…
The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is a foundational measure for comparing probability distributions. Yet in multivariate settings, its single value often obscures the underlying reasons for divergence, conflating mismatches in individual…
Information geometry and optimal transport are two distinct geometric frameworks for modeling families of probability measures. During the recent years, there has been a surge of research endeavors that cut across these two areas and…
In this paper we prove the optimality of an aggregation procedure. We prove lower bounds for aggregation of model selection type of $M$ density estimators for the Kullback-Leiber divergence (KL), the Hellinger's distance and the…
The preferential attachment (PA) process is a popular theory for explaining network power-law degree distributions. In PA, the probability that a new vertex adds an edge to an existing vertex depends on the connectivity of the target…
We decompose the Kullback--Leibler generalization error (GE) -- the expected KL divergence from the data distribution to the trained model -- of unsupervised learning into three non-negative components: model error, data bias, and variance.…
The price system is often said to economize on information, but economics has lacked a formal measure of how much information it saves. This paper develops such a measure. We construct a proof-theoretic framework for decentralized…
We consider a generalization of an important class of high-dimensional inference problems, namely spiked symmetric matrix models, often used as probabilistic models for principal component analysis. Such paradigmatic models have recently…
Clinical decision-making often involves selecting tests that are costly, invasive, or time-consuming, motivating individualized, sequential strategies for what to measure and when to stop ascertaining. We study the problem of learning…
In this paper we address the problem of information-constrained optimal control for an interconnected system subject to one-step communication delays and power constraints. The goal is to minimize a finite-horizon quadratic cost by…
In this paper, we study a problem of detecting the source of diffused information by querying individuals, given a sample snapshot of the information diffusion graph, where two queries are asked: {\em (i)} whether the respondent is the…
In this paper we empirically evaluate biased methods for alpha-divergence minimization. In particular, we focus on how the bias affects the final solutions found, and how this depends on the dimensionality of the problem. We find that (i)…
We study the top-$k$ selection problem under the differential privacy model: $m$ items are rated according to votes of a set of clients. We consider a setting in which algorithms can retrieve data via a sequence of accesses, each either a…
There are many applications that benefit from computing the exact divergence between 2 discrete probability measures, including machine learning. Unfortunately, in the absence of any assumptions on the structure or independencies within…
We propose a cost-effective framework for preference elicitation and aggregation under the Plackett-Luce model with features. Given a budget, our framework iteratively computes the most cost-effective elicitation questions in order to help…
We propose a fundamental metric for measuring the distance between two distributions. This metric, referred to as the decision-focused (DF) divergence, is tailored to stochastic linear optimization problems in which the objective…