相关论文: Optimal prediction of Markov chains with and witho…

The problem of estimating an unknown discrete distribution from its samples is a fundamental tenet of statistical learning. Over the past decade, it attracted significant research effort and has been solved for a variety of divergence…

Consider the problem of predicting the next symbol given a sample path of length n, whose joint distribution belongs to a distribution class that may have long-term memory. The goal is to compete with the conditional predictor that knows…

This paper studies the estimation of low-rank Markov chains from empirical trajectories. We propose a non-convex estimator based on rank-constrained likelihood maximization. Statistical upper bounds are provided for the Kullback-Leiber…

We study the maximum likelihood estimator of density of $n$ independent observations, under the assumption that it is well approximated by a mixture with a large number of components. The main focus is on statistical properties with respect…

In this paper, we propose an approach to obtain reduced-order models of Markov chains. Our approach is composed of two information-theoretic processes. The first is a means of comparing pairs of stationary chains on different state spaces,…

We consider the problem of estimating from sample paths the absolute spectral gap $\gamma_*$ of a reversible, irreducible and aperiodic Markov chain $(X_t)_{t \in \mathbb{N}}$ over a finite state space $\Omega$. We propose the ${\tt UCPI}$…

Mostof the existing literature on supervised machine learning problems focuses on the case when the training data set is drawn from an i.i.d. sample. However, many practical problems are characterized by temporal dependence and strong…

We prove that the absolute spectral gap of any monotone Markov chain coincides with its optimal Ollivier-Ricci curvature, where the word `optimal' refers to the choice of the underlying metric. Moreover, we provide a new expression in terms…

Time-homogeneous Markov chains are often used as disease progression models in studies of cost-effectiveness and optimal decision-making. Maximum likelihood estimation of these models can be challenging when data are collected at a time…

Estimating the entropy based on data is one of the prototypical problems in distribution property testing and estimation. For estimating the Shannon entropy of a distribution on $S$ elements with independent samples, [Paninski2004] showed…

Modeling unknown systems from data is a precursor of system optimization and sequential decision making. In this paper, we focus on learning a Markov model from a single trajectory of states. Suppose that the transition model has a small…

Nonparametric identification and maximum likelihood estimation for finite-state hidden Markov models are investigated. We obtain identification of the parameters as well as the order of the Markov chain if the transition probability…

The spectral gap $\gamma$ of a finite, ergodic, and reversible Markov chain is an important parameter measuring the asymptotic rate of convergence. In applications, the transition matrix $P$ may be unknown, yet one sample of the chain up to…

The theory of $L^2$-spectral gaps for reversible Markov chains has been studied by many authors. In this paper we consider positive recurrent general state space Markov chains with stationary transition probabilities. Replacing the…

In this paper, we present a method for reducing a regular, discrete-time Markov chain (DTMC) to another DTMC with a given, typically much smaller number of states. The cost of reduction is defined as the Kullback-Leibler divergence rate…

The problem of estimating the Kullback-Leibler divergence $D(P\|Q)$ between two unknown distributions $P$ and $Q$ is studied, under the assumption that the alphabet size $k$ of the distributions can scale to infinity. The estimation is…

We study regret minimization in online episodic linear Markov Decision Processes, and obtain rate-optimal $\widetilde O (\sqrt K)$ regret where $K$ denotes the number of episodes. Our work is the first to establish the optimal (w.r.t.~$K$)…

Based on information theory, we present a method to determine an optimal Markov approximation for modelling and prediction from time series data. The method finds a balance between minimal modelling errors by taking as much as possible…

We consider the problem of predicting the next observation given a sequence of past observations, and consider the extent to which accurate prediction requires complex algorithms that explicitly leverage long-range dependencies. Perhaps…

Hu and Mehta (2024) posed an open problem: what is the optimal instance-dependent rate for the stochastic decision-theoretic online learning (with $K$ actions and $T$ rounds) under $\varepsilon$-differential privacy? Before, the best known…