Related papers: Occam's razor meets WMAP
We consider the gravitational Wilsonian effective action at low energy when all the particles of the standard model have decoupled. When the ${\cal R}^2$ terms dominate, the theory is equivalent to a scalar-tensor theory with the universal…
Low-rank matrix recovery is well-known to exhibit benign nonconvexity under the restricted isometry property (RIP): every second-order critical point is globally optimal, so local methods provably recover the ground truth. Motivated by the…
We perform an independent foreground analysis of the WMAP maps to produce a cleaned CMB map (available online) useful for cross-correlation with, e.g., galaxy and X-ray maps. We use a variant of the Tegmark & Efstathiou (1996) technique…
We revisit the Scalar Weak Gravity Conjecture and investigate the possibility to impose that scalar interactions dominate over gravitational ones. More precisely, we look for consequences of assuming that, for leading scalar interactions,…
A model of Universe with a small eccentricity due to the presence of a magnetic field at the decoupling time (i.e. an Ellipsoidal Universe) has been recently proposed for the solution of the low quadrupole anomaly of the angular power…
We provide a systematic framework for theories of multiple axions. We discover a novel type of "alignment" that renders even very complex theories analytically tractable. Theories with about 100 axions and random parameters have an…
Robust low-rank approximation under row-wise adversarial corruption can be achieved with a single pass, randomized procedure that detects and removes outlier rows by thresholding their projected norms. We propose a scalable, non-iterative…
A simple algorithm which gives the multipole vectors in terms of the roots of a polynomial is given. We find that the reported alignmet of the low l multipole vectors can be summarised as an anti-alignmet of these with the dipole direction.…
According to Wen's theory, a universal behavior of the fractional quantum Hall edge is expected at sufficiently low energies, where the dispersion of the elementary edge excitation is linear. A microscopic calculation shows that the actual…
Several accurate analyses have revealed a statistically significant North-South ecliptic asymmetry in the large-angle correlations strength of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation temperature field data from the Wilkinson…
We revisit the problem of robust linear regression under Gaussian covariates with an unknown covariance matrix of condition number $\kappa$. For this fundamental problem, significant gaps remain in our understanding of the trade-offs among…
Rare charm decays offer the unique possibility to explore flavour-changing neutral-currents in the up-sector within the Standard Model and beyond. Due to the lack of effective methods to reliably describe its low energy dynamics, rare charm…
Observations by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite have identified an excess of microwave emission from the centre of the Milky Way. It has been suggested that this WMAP haze emission could potentially be synchrotron…
We present a model-independent description of the exclusive rare decays B-> K* e+e- in the low recoil region (large lepton invariant mass q^2 ~ m_b^2). In this region the long-distance effects from quark loops can be computed with the help…
The aim of this note (as well as of the course itself) is to give a largely self-contained proof of two of the main results in the field of low-rank matrix recovery. This field aims for identification of low-rank matrices from only limited…
This paper presents several novel theoretical results regarding the recovery of a low-rank matrix from just a few measurements consisting of linear combinations of the matrix entries. We show that properly constrained nuclear-norm…
Recent developments in the theory of weak decays of heavy flavours are reviewed. Applications to exclusive semileptonic B decays, the semileptonic branching ratio and charm counting, beauty lifetimes, and hadronic B decays are discussed.
For measuring tail risk with scarce extreme events, extreme value analysis is often invoked as the statistical tool to extrapolate to the tail of a distribution. The presence of large datasets benefits tail risk analysis by providing more…
Conventionally, regression discontinuity analysis contrasts a univariate regression's limits as its independent variable, $R$, approaches a cut-point, $c$, from either side. Alternative methods target the average treatment effect in a small…
Regression is the workhorse of statistics, and is often faced with real data that contain outliers. When these are casewise outliers, that is, cases that are entirely wrong or belong to a different population, the issue can be remedied by…