Related papers: Occam's razor meets WMAP
Canonical RD designs yield credible local estimates of the treatment effect at the cutoff under mild continuity assumptions, but they fail to identify treatment effects away from the cutoff without additional assumptions. The fundamental…
Bayesian model selection is a tool to decide whether the introduction of a new parameter is warranted by data. I argue that the usual sampling statistic significance tests for a null hypothesis can be misleading, since they do not take into…
We investigate the Statistical Isotropy and Gaussianity of the CMB fluctuations, using a set of multipole vector functions capable of separating these two issues. In general a multipole is broken into a frame and $2\ell-3$ ordered…
This article applies the principle of Occam's Razor to non-parametric model building of statistical data, by finding a model with the minimal number of bits, leading to an exceptionally effective regularization method for probability…
Low-rank approximation of a matrix by means of structured random sampling has been consistently efficient in its extensive empirical studies around the globe, but adequate formal support for this empirical phenomenon has been missing so…
We perform a frequentist analysis of the bispectrum of WMAP first year data. We find clear signal domination up to l=200, with overall consistency with Gaussianity except for the following features. There is a flat patch (i.e. a low…
Traditional statistics forbids use of test data (a.k.a. holdout data) during training. Dwork et al. 2015 pointed out that current practices in machine learning, whereby researchers build upon each other's models, copying hyperparameters and…
The nonnegative rank of a nonnegative matrix is the minimum number of nonnegative rank-one factors needed to reconstruct it exactly. The problem of determining this rank and computing the corresponding nonnegative factors is difficult;…
Subsampling methods have been recently proposed to speed up least squares estimation in large scale settings. However, these algorithms are typically not robust to outliers or corruptions in the observed covariates. The concept of influence…
The quadrupole power of cosmic microwave background (CMB) temperature anisotropies seen in the WMAP data is puzzlingly low. In this paper we demonstrate that Minimum Variance Optimization (MVO), a technique used by many authors (including…
A number of studies of WMAP and Planck claimed the low multipole (specially quadrupole) power deficiency in CMB power spectrum. Anomaly in the orientations of the low multipoles have also been claimed. There is a possibility that the power…
(Abridged) We present the angular power spectra derived from the 7-year maps and discuss the cosmological conclusions that can be inferred from WMAP data alone. The third acoustic peak in the TT spectrum is now well measured by WMAP. In the…
We perform a global analysis of $|\Delta c| = |\Delta u| = 1$ transitions using recent data on $D^0 \to \mu^+\mu^-$, $D^+ \to \pi ^+\,\mu^+\mu^-$, $\Lambda_c \to p\,\mu^+\mu^-$, and $D^0 \to \pi^+\pi^-\,\mu^+\mu^-$ decays, and work out…
The weak lensing power spectrum carries cosmological information via its dependence on the growth of structure and on geometric factors. Since much of the cosmological information comes from scales affected by nonlinear clustering,…
This paper focuses on cosmological constraints derived from analysis of WMAP data alone. A simple LCDM cosmological model fits the five-year WMAP temperature and polarization data. The basic parameters of the model are consistent with the…
We establish a statistical learning theoretical framework aimed at extrapolation, or out-of-domain generalization, on the unobserved tails of covariates in continuous regression problems. Our strategy involves performing statistical…
The performance of Least Squares (LS) estimators is studied in isotonic, unimodal and convex regression. Our results have the form of sharp oracle inequalities that account for the model misspecification error. In isotonic and unimodal…
It has been shown that, if a model displays long-range (power-law) spatial correlations, its equal-time correlation matrix of this model will also have a power law tail in the distribution of its high-lying eigenvalues. The purpose of this…
We analyze the alignment of the low multipoles (quadrupole and octupole) of various maps of the WMAP 5yr release: the CMB maps obtained with ILC and MCMC methods, the CMB map in the V band after foreground reduction, and, for comparison,…
We refine Osserman's argument on the exceptional values of the Gauss map of algebraic minimal surfaces. This gives an effective estimate for the number of exceptional values and the totally ramified value number for a wider class of…