Related papers: Stein Shrinkage and Second-Order Efficiency for se…
We study a class of statistical inverse problems with non-linear pointwise operators motivated by concrete statistical applications. A two-step procedure is proposed, where the first step smoothes the data and inverts the non-linearity.…
We study a well-known estimator of the fractal index of a stochastic process. Our framework is very general and encompasses many models of interest; we show how to extend the theory of the estimator to a large class of non-Gaussian…
We present a finite-time analysis of two smoothed functional stochastic approximation algorithms for simulation-based optimization. The first is a two time-scale gradient-based method, while the second is a three time-scale Newton-based…
Gradient information on the sampling distribution can be used to reduce the variance of Monte Carlo estimators via Stein's method. An important application is that of estimating an expectation of a test function along the sample path of a…
We consider a semiparametric convolution model. We observe random variables having a distribution given by the convolution of some unknown density $f$ and some partially known noise density $g$. In this work, $g$ is assumed exponentially…
This paper proposes a stochastic variant of a classic algorithm---the cubic-regularized Newton method [Nesterov and Polyak 2006]. The proposed algorithm efficiently escapes saddle points and finds approximate local minima for general…
This paper introduces a flexible regularization approach that reduces point estimation risk of group means stemming from e.g. categorical regressors, (quasi-)experimental data or panel data models. The loss function is penalized by adding…
Algorithms to solve variational regularization of ill-posed inverse problems usually involve operators that depend on a collection of continuous parameters. When these operators enjoy some (local) regularity, these parameters can be…
Many core problems in robotics can be framed as constrained optimization problems. Often on these problems, the robotic system has uncertainty, or it would be advantageous to identify multiple high quality feasible solutions. To enable…
In this paper, we study and analyze zeroth-order stochastic approximation algorithms for solving bilvel problems, when neither the upper/lower objective values, nor their unbiased gradient estimates are available. In particular, exploiting…
We investigate the Randomized Stochastic Accelerated Gradient (RSAG) method, utilizing either constant or adaptive step sizes, for stochastic optimization problems with generalized smooth objective functions. Under relaxed affine variance…
We consider a higher-order Milstein scheme for stochastic partial differential equations with trace class noise which fulfill a certain commutativity condition. A novel technique to generally improve the order of convergence of Taylor…
Penalized spline estimation with discrete difference penalties (P-splines) is a popular estimation method for semiparametric models, but the classical least-squares estimator is highly sensitive to deviations from its ideal model…
We consider the problem of estimating an unknown function f* and its partial derivatives from a noisy data set of n observations, where we make no assumptions about f* except that it is smooth in the sense that it has square integrable…
We study unconstrained optimization problems of nonsmooth, nonconvex Lipschitz functions, using only noisy pairwise comparisons governed by a known link function. Our goal is to compute a $(\delta,\varepsilon)$-Goldstein stationary point.…
We propose a stochastic variance-reduced cubic regularized Newton method for non-convex optimization. At the core of our algorithm is a novel semi-stochastic gradient along with a semi-stochastic Hessian, which are specifically designed for…
A new, fast second-order method is proposed that achieves the optimal $\mathcal{O}\left(|\log(\epsilon)|\epsilon^{-3/2}\right)$ complexity to obtain first-order $\epsilon$-stationary points. Crucially, this is deduced without assuming the…
The order of smoothness chosen in nonparametric estimation problems is critical. This choice balances the tradeoff between model parsimony and data overfitting. The most common approach used in this context is cross-validation. However,…
We consider the problem of the estimation of the mean function of an inhomogeneous Poisson process when its intensity function is periodic. For the mean integrated squared error (MISE) there is a classical lower bound for all estimators and…
We propose two novel unbiased estimators of the integral $\int_{[0,1]^{s}}f(u) du$ for a function $f$, which depend on a smoothness parameter $r\in\mathbb{N}$. The first estimator integrates exactly the polynomials of degrees $p<r$ and…