Related papers: Sensitivity of searches for new signals and its op…
The increasing recognition of the association between adverse human health conditions and many environmental substances as well as processes has led to the need to monitor them. An important problem that arises in environmental statistics…
Rare events can potentially occur in many applications. When manifested as opportunities to be exploited, risks to be ameliorated, or certain features to be extracted, such events become of paramount significance. Due to their sporadic…
The measurement of the efficiency of an event selection is always an important part of the analysis of experimental data. The statistical techniques which are needed to determine the efficiency and its uncertainty are reviewed. Frequentist…
A compression function is a map that slims down an observational set into a subset of reduced size, while preserving its informational content. In multiple applications, the condition that one new observation makes the compressed set change…
Certain monotonicity properties of the Poisson approximation to the binomial distribution are established. As a natural application of these results, exact (rather than approximate) tests of hypotheses on an unknown value of the parameter…
Bayesian, classical, and extended maximum likelihood approaches to estimation of upper limits in experiments with small numbers of signal events are surveyed. The discussion covers only experiments whose outcomes are well described by a…
Detection of a signal under noise is a classical signal processing problem. When monitoring spatial phenomena under a fixed budget, i.e., either physical, economical or computational constraints, the selection of a subset of available…
Causal inference with observational studies often suffers from unmeasured confounding, yielding biased estimators based on the unconfoundedness assumption. Sensitivity analysis assesses how the causal conclusions change with respect to…
Observational studies provide invaluable opportunities to draw causal inference, but they may suffer from biases due to pretreatment difference between treated and control units. Matching is a popular approach to reduce observed covariate…
This paper studies the problem of finding the exact ranking from noisy comparisons. A comparison over a set of $m$ items produces a noisy outcome about the most preferred item, and reveals some information about the ranking. By repeatedly…
Agents acting in the natural world aim at selecting appropriate actions based on noisy and partial sensory observations. Many behaviors leading to decision mak- ing and action selection in a closed loop setting are naturally phrased within…
Though the ability of human beings to deal with probabilities has been put into question, the assessment of rarity is a crucial competence underlying much of human decision-making and is pervasive in spontaneous narrative behaviour. This…
The model representing two independent Poisson processes, labelled as "signal" and "background" and both contributing at the same time to the total number of counted events, is considered from a Bayesian point of view. This is a widely used…
Individuals have an intuitive perception of what makes a good coincidence. Though the sensitivity to coincidences has often been presented as resulting from an erroneous assessment of probability, it appears to be a genuine competence,…
This paper studies the sample complexity of searching over multiple populations. We consider a large number of populations, each corresponding to either distribution P0 or P1. The goal of the search problem studied here is to find one…
The design of optimal test statistics is a key task in frequentist statistics and for a number of scenarios optimal test statistics such as the profile-likelihood ratio are known. By turning this argument around we can find the profile…
Philosophers now seem to agree that frequentism is an untenable strategy to explain the meaning of probabilities. Nevertheless, I want to revive frequentism, and I will do so by grounding probabilities on typicality in the same way as the…
The knowledge of channel statistics can be very helpful in making sound opportunistic spectrum access decisions. It is therefore desirable to be able to efficiently and accurately estimate channel statistics. In this paper we study the…
Compressed sensing is a technique to sample compressible signals below the Nyquist rate, whilst still allowing near optimal reconstruction of the signal. In this paper we present a theoretical analysis of the iterative hard thresholding…
Feature selection is popular for obtaining small, interpretable, yet highly accurate prediction models. Conventional feature-selection methods typically yield one feature set only, which might not suffice in some scenarios. For example,…