London (No. 18 & 19 Southampton Place, Euston Square, New Road) : Published ... by the proprietors [E. & W. Finden], May 1, 1839.

[London?] : Cassell & Company Limited, [between 1800 and 1899]

Si stampano in Roma (alla Pace ; all'insegna di Parigi) : per Giovan Jacomo Rossi, [1641?]

[London] (Haymarket) : Published ... for the proprietors, by T McLean, Septr. 1. 1836 ([London?] : Printed by Lahee & Co.)

London (Charlotte Street, Rathbone Place) : Published as the Act directs ... by Wm. Woollett, engraver to His Majesty, 4 June, 1778.

[19--?]

[Paris] : Calcographie du Louvre, Musées Imperiaux, [1849?]

[Edinburgh], [between 1788 and 1797]

[1905?]

[London] : [Richard Baldwin], [1752]

[The Netherlands] : [publisher not identified], [1688]

The donation comes as Flint city and school leaders continue to grapple with the fallout from a contaminated-water crisis that began in 2015. The filtration systems, which will be installed by January, should allow students to once again district students and staff to drink from and fill up water bo

Could they lose one or more of Murray, Jarry, and DeSmith?

The Florida Panthers finally have a deal with Russian forward Grigori Denisenko. The Panthers announced Tuesday that Denisenko has agreed to a three-year entry level contract - though it remains unclear when that contract will be officially signed and begin to take effect, given the uncertainty of the current NHL season because of the coronavirus pandemic. Denisenko was the 15th overall pick by the Panthers in the 2018 draft.

How to tune in to Tom Wilson's best games on Sunday.

The Boston Bruins didn't take long to put the painful memory of the 2010 Stanley Cup Playoffs behind them.

Ridly Greig, son of Flyers scout Mark Greig, is a center with 200-foot bite and should be available for the club in the first round of the 2020 NHL draft. By Jordan Hall

The Washington Capitals on Friday placed Brendan Leipsic on unconditional waivers to terminate his contract after he made disparaging comments about women and teammates in a private social media chat. In a conversation involving his brother and Florida Panthers minor leaguer Jack Rodewald, Leipsic commented on the physical appearances of Vancouver forward Tanner Pearson's wife and Edmonton captain Connor McDavid's girlfriend. The NHL called it ''inexcusable conduct'' and said it would address the matter with the Capitals and Panthers.

Gov. Erik Greitens has resigned and the board doesn't have enough governor-appointed members to form a quorum. Important tasks have been piling up.

2019

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Rockville, Maryland : National Institute on Drug Abuse, 1995.

Springfield, Virginia : National Technical Information Service, 1974.

Washington : Dept. of Transportation, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 1976.

Hear how former Oregon State guard and current member of the WNBA's LA Sparks Sydney Wiese is recovering from a COVID-19 diagnosis, seeing friends and family show support and love during a trying time.

Laurent Gardes.

Source: Electronic Journal of Statistics, Volume 14, Number 1, 661--701.

Abstract:
The first part of the paper is dedicated to the construction of a $gamma$ - nonparametric confidence interval for a conditional quantile with a level depending on the sample size. When this level tends to 0 or 1 as the sample size increases, the conditional quantile is said to be extreme and is located in the tail of the conditional distribution. The proposed confidence interval is constructed by approximating the distribution of the order statistics selected with a nearest neighbor approach by a Beta distribution. We show that its coverage probability converges to the preselected probability $gamma $ and its accuracy is illustrated on a simulation study. When the dimension of the covariate increases, the coverage probability of the confidence interval can be very different from $gamma $. This is a well known consequence of the data sparsity especially in the tail of the distribution. In a second part, a dimension reduction procedure is proposed in order to select more appropriate nearest neighbors in the right tail of the distribution and in turn to obtain a better coverage probability for extreme conditional quantiles. This procedure is based on the Tail Conditional Independence assumption introduced in (Gardes, Extremes , pp. 57–95, 18(3) , 2018).

Gianluca Finocchio, Johannes Schmidt-Hieber.

Source: Electronic Journal of Statistics, Volume 14, Number 1, 239--271.

Abstract:
Consider the Gaussian sequence model under the additional assumption that a fixed fraction of the means is known. We study the problem of variance estimation from a frequentist Bayesian perspective. The maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) for $sigma^{2}$ is biased and inconsistent. This raises the question whether the posterior is able to correct the MLE in this case. By developing a new proving strategy that uses refined properties of the posterior distribution, we find that the marginal posterior is inconsistent for any i.i.d. prior on the mean parameters. In particular, no assumption on the decay of the prior needs to be imposed. Surprisingly, we also find that consistency can be retained for a hierarchical prior based on Gaussian mixtures. In this case we also establish a limiting shape result and determine the limit distribution. In contrast to the classical Bernstein-von Mises theorem, the limit is non-Gaussian. We show that the Bayesian analysis leads to new statistical estimators outperforming the correctly calibrated MLE in a numerical simulation study.

Wenjing Wang, Xin Zhang, Qing Mai.

Source: Electronic Journal of Statistics, Volume 14, Number 1, 82--109.

Abstract:
Clustering analysis is an important unsupervised learning technique in multivariate statistics and machine learning. In this paper, we propose a set of new mixture models called CLEMM (in short for Clustering with Envelope Mixture Models) that is based on the widely used Gaussian mixture model assumptions and the nascent research area of envelope methodology. Formulated mostly for regression models, envelope methodology aims for simultaneous dimension reduction and efficient parameter estimation, and includes a very recent formulation of envelope discriminant subspace for classification and discriminant analysis. Motivated by the envelope discriminant subspace pursuit in classification, we consider parsimonious probabilistic mixture models where the cluster analysis can be improved by projecting the data onto a latent lower-dimensional subspace. The proposed CLEMM framework and the associated envelope-EM algorithms thus provide foundations for envelope methods in unsupervised and semi-supervised learning problems. Numerical studies on simulated data and two benchmark data sets show significant improvement of our propose methods over the classical methods such as Gaussian mixture models, K-means and hierarchical clustering algorithms. An R package is available at https://github.com/kusakehan/CLEMM.

Gwenaëlle Castellan, Anthony Cousien, Viet Chi Tran.

Source: Electronic Journal of Statistics, Volume 14, Number 1, 50--81.

Abstract:
Global sensitivity analysis is a set of methods aiming at quantifying the contribution of an uncertain input parameter of the model (or combination of parameters) on the variability of the response. We consider here the estimation of the Sobol indices of order 1 which are commonly-used indicators based on a decomposition of the output’s variance. In a deterministic framework, when the same inputs always give the same outputs, these indices are usually estimated by replicated simulations of the model. In a stochastic framework, when the response given a set of input parameters is not unique due to randomness in the model, metamodels are often used to approximate the mean and dispersion of the response by deterministic functions. We propose a new non-parametric estimator without the need of defining a metamodel to estimate the Sobol indices of order 1. The estimator is based on warped wavelets and is adaptive in the regularity of the model. The convergence of the mean square error to zero, when the number of simulations of the model tend to infinity, is computed and an elbow effect is shown, depending on the regularity of the model. Applications in Epidemiology are carried to illustrate the use of non-parametric estimators.

Guanyang Wang.

Source: Electronic Journal of Statistics, Volume 14, Number 1, 1690--1706.

Abstract:
Uniform sampling of binary matrix with fixed margins is an important and difficult problem in statistics, computer science, ecology and so on. The well-known swap algorithm would be inefficient when the size of the matrix becomes large or when the matrix is too sparse/dense. Here we propose the Rectangle Loop algorithm, a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm to sample binary matrices with fixed margins uniformly. Theoretically the Rectangle Loop algorithm is better than the swap algorithm in Peskun’s order. Empirically studies also demonstrates the Rectangle Loop algorithm is remarkablely more efficient than the swap algorithm.

Ryoya Oda, Hirokazu Yanagihara.

Source: Electronic Journal of Statistics, Volume 14, Number 1, 1386--1412.

Abstract:
We put forward a variable selection method for selecting explanatory variables in a normality-assumed multivariate linear regression. It is cumbersome to calculate variable selection criteria for all subsets of explanatory variables when the number of explanatory variables is large. Therefore, we propose a fast and consistent variable selection method based on a generalized $C_{p}$ criterion. The consistency of the method is provided by a high-dimensional asymptotic framework such that the sample size and the sum of the dimensions of response vectors and explanatory vectors divided by the sample size tend to infinity and some positive constant which are less than one, respectively. Through numerical simulations, it is shown that the proposed method has a high probability of selecting the true subset of explanatory variables and is fast under a moderate sample size even when the number of dimensions is large.

Yichong Wu, Tiejun Li, Xiaoping Liu, Luonan Chen.

Source: Electronic Journal of Statistics, Volume 14, Number 1, 1269--1301.

Abstract:
Detecting the change of biological interaction networks is of great importance in biological and medical research. We proposed a simple loss function, named as CrossFDTL, to identify the network change or differential network by estimating the difference between two precision matrices under Gaussian assumption. The CrossFDTL is a natural fusion of the D-trace loss for the considered two networks by imposing the $ell _{1}$ penalty to the differential matrix to ensure sparsity. The key point of our method is to utilize the cross variables, which correspond to the sum and difference of two precision matrices instead of using their original forms. Moreover, we developed an efficient minimization algorithm for the proposed loss function and further rigorously proved its convergence. Numerical results showed that our method outperforms the existing methods in both accuracy and convergence speed for the simulated and real data.

Fabien Panloup, Samy Tindel, Maylis Varvenne.

Source: Electronic Journal of Statistics, Volume 14, Number 1, 1075--1136.

Abstract:
In this paper we consider the drift estimation problem for a general differential equation driven by an additive multidimensional fractional Brownian motion, under ergodic assumptions on the drift coefficient. Our estimation procedure is based on the identification of the invariant measure, and we provide consistency results as well as some information about the convergence rate. We also give some examples of coefficients for which the identifiability assumption for the invariant measure is satisfied.

Xianzheng Huang, Haiming Zhou.

Source: Electronic Journal of Statistics, Volume 14, Number 1, 970--1023.

Abstract:
We consider estimating the density of a response conditioning on an error-prone covariate. Motivated by two existing kernel density estimators in the absence of covariate measurement error, we propose a method to correct the existing estimators for measurement error. Asymptotic properties of the resultant estimators under different types of measurement error distributions are derived. Moreover, we adjust bandwidths readily available from existing bandwidth selection methods developed for error-free data to obtain bandwidths for the new estimators. Extensive simulation studies are carried out to compare the proposed estimators with naive estimators that ignore measurement error, which also provide empirical evidence for the effectiveness of the proposed bandwidth selection methods. A real-life data example is used to illustrate implementation of these methods under practical scenarios. An R package, lpme, is developed for implementing all considered methods, which we demonstrate via an R code example in Appendix B.2.

Alessandro Casa, José E. Chacón, Giovanna Menardi.

Source: Electronic Journal of Statistics, Volume 14, Number 1, 835--856.

Abstract:
Density-based clustering relies on the idea of linking groups to some specific features of the probability distribution underlying the data. The reference to a true, yet unknown, population structure allows framing the clustering problem in a standard inferential setting, where the concept of ideal population clustering is defined as the partition induced by the true density function. The nonparametric formulation of this approach, known as modal clustering, draws a correspondence between the groups and the domains of attraction of the density modes. Operationally, a nonparametric density estimate is required and a proper selection of the amount of smoothing, governing the shape of the density and hence possibly the modal structure, is crucial to identify the final partition. In this work, we address the issue of density estimation for modal clustering from an asymptotic perspective. A natural and easy to interpret metric to measure the distance between density-based partitions is discussed, its asymptotic approximation explored, and employed to study the problem of bandwidth selection for nonparametric modal clustering.

This paper considers online convex optimization over a complicated constraint set, which typically consists of multiple functional constraints and a set constraint. The conventional online projection algorithm (Zinkevich, 2003) can be difficult to implement due to the potentially high computation complexity of the projection operation. In this paper, we relax the functional constraints by allowing them to be violated at each round but still requiring them to be satisfied in the long term. This type of relaxed online convex optimization (with long term constraints) was first considered in Mahdavi et al. (2012). That prior work proposes an algorithm to achieve $O(sqrt{T})$ regret and $O(T^{3/4})$ constraint violations for general problems and another algorithm to achieve an $O(T^{2/3})$ bound for both regret and constraint violations when the constraint set can be described by a finite number of linear constraints. A recent extension in Jenatton et al. (2016) can achieve $O(T^{max{ heta,1- heta}})$ regret and $O(T^{1- heta/2})$ constraint violations where $ hetain (0,1)$. The current paper proposes a new simple algorithm that yields improved performance in comparison to prior works. The new algorithm achieves an $O(sqrt{T})$ regret bound with $O(1)$ constraint violations.

Latent space models are effective tools for statistical modeling and visualization of network data. Due to their close connection to generalized linear models, it is also natural to incorporate covariate information in them. The current paper presents two universal fitting algorithms for networks with edge covariates: one based on nuclear norm penalization and the other based on projected gradient descent. Both algorithms are motivated by maximizing the likelihood function for an existing class of inner-product models, and we establish their statistical rates of convergence for these models. In addition, the theory informs us that both methods work simultaneously for a wide range of different latent space models that allow latent positions to affect edge formation in flexible ways, such as distance models. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the methods is demonstrated on a number of real world network data sets for different statistical tasks, including community detection with and without edge covariates, and network assisted learning.

We study the misclassification error for community detection in general heterogeneous stochastic block models (SBM) with noisy or partial label information. We establish a connection between the misclassification rate and the notion of minimum energy on the local neighborhood of the SBM. We develop an optimally weighted message passing algorithm to reconstruct labels for SBM based on the minimum energy flow and the eigenvectors of a certain Markov transition matrix. The general SBM considered in this paper allows for unequal-size communities, degree heterogeneity, and different connection probabilities among blocks. We focus on how to optimally weigh the message passing to improve misclassification.

One of the common tasks in unsupervised learning is dimensionality reduction, where the goal is to find meaningful low-dimensional structures hidden in high-dimensional data. Sometimes referred to as manifold learning, this problem is closely related to the problem of localization, which aims at embedding a weighted graph into a low-dimensional Euclidean space. Several methods have been proposed for localization, and also manifold learning. Nonetheless, the robustness property of most of them is little understood. In this paper, we obtain perturbation bounds for classical scaling and trilateration, which are then applied to derive performance bounds for Isomap, Landmark Isomap, and Maximum Variance Unfolding. A new perturbation bound for procrustes analysis plays a key role.

In statistical learning framework with regressions, interactions are the contributions to the response variable from the products of the explanatory variables. In high-dimensional problems, detecting interactions is challenging due to combinatorial complexity and limited data information. We consider detecting interactions by exploring their connections with the principal Hessian matrix. Specifically, we propose a one-step synthetic approach for estimating the principal Hessian matrix by a penalized M-estimator. An alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is proposed to efficiently solve the encountered regularized optimization problem. Based on the sparse estimator, we detect the interactions by identifying its nonzero components. Our method directly targets at the interactions, and it requires no structural assumption on the hierarchy of the interactions effects. We show that our estimator is theoretically valid, computationally efficient, and practically useful for detecting the interactions in a broad spectrum of scenarios.

We study the least-squares regression problem over a Hilbert space, covering nonparametric regression over a reproducing kernel Hilbert space as a special case. We first investigate regularized algorithms adapted to a projection operator on a closed subspace of the Hilbert space. We prove convergence results with respect to variants of norms, under a capacity assumption on the hypothesis space and a regularity condition on the target function. As a result, we obtain optimal rates for regularized algorithms with randomized sketches, provided that the sketch dimension is proportional to the effective dimension up to a logarithmic factor. As a byproduct, we obtain similar results for Nystr"{o}m regularized algorithms. Our results provide optimal, distribution-dependent rates that do not have any saturation effect for sketched/Nystr"{o}m regularized algorithms, considering both the attainable and non-attainable cases, in the well-conditioned regimes. We then study stochastic gradient methods with projection over the subspace, allowing multi-pass over the data and minibatches, and we derive similar optimal statistical convergence results.

In many applications, observed data are influenced by some combination of latent causes. For example, suppose sensors are placed inside a building to record responses such as temperature, humidity, power consumption and noise levels. These random, observed responses are typically affected by many unobserved, latent factors (or features) within the building such as the number of individuals, the turning on and off of electrical devices, power surges, etc. These latent factors are usually present for a contiguous period of time before disappearing; further, multiple factors could be present at a time. This paper develops new probabilistic methodology and inference methods for random object generation influenced by latent features exhibiting temporal persistence. Every datum is associated with subsets of a potentially infinite number of hidden, persistent features that account for temporal dynamics in an observation. The ensuing class of dynamic models constructed by adapting the Indian Buffet Process — a probability measure on the space of random, unbounded binary matrices — finds use in a variety of applications arising in operations, signal processing, biomedicine, marketing, image analysis, etc. Illustrations using synthetic and real data are provided.

Sufficient dimension reduction (SDR) is a very useful concept for exploratory analysis and data visualization in regression, especially when the number of covariates is large. Many SDR methods have been proposed for regression with a continuous response, where the central subspace (CS) is the target of estimation. Various conditions, such as the linearity condition and the constant covariance condition, are imposed so that these methods can estimate at least a portion of the CS. In this paper we study SDR for regression and discriminant analysis with categorical response. Motivated by the exploratory analysis and data visualization aspects of SDR, we propose a new geometric framework to reformulate the SDR problem in terms of manifold optimization and introduce a new concept called Maximum Separation Subspace (MASES). The MASES naturally preserves the “sufficiency” in SDR without imposing additional conditions on the predictor distribution, and directly inspires a semi-parametric estimator. Numerical studies show MASES exhibits superior performance as compared with competing SDR methods in specific settings.

Consider an unknown smooth function $f: [0,1]^d ightarrow mathbb{R}$, and assume we are given $n$ noisy mod 1 samples of $f$, i.e., $y_i = (f(x_i) + eta_i) mod 1$, for $x_i in [0,1]^d$, where $eta_i$ denotes the noise. Given the samples $(x_i,y_i)_{i=1}^{n}$, our goal is to recover smooth, robust estimates of the clean samples $f(x_i) mod 1$. We formulate a natural approach for solving this problem, which works with angular embeddings of the noisy mod 1 samples over the unit circle, inspired by the angular synchronization framework. This amounts to solving a smoothness regularized least-squares problem -- a quadratically constrained quadratic program (QCQP) -- where the variables are constrained to lie on the unit circle. Our proposed approach is based on solving its relaxation, which is a trust-region sub-problem and hence solvable efficiently. We provide theoretical guarantees demonstrating its robustness to noise for adversarial, as well as random Gaussian and Bernoulli noise models. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first such theoretical results for this problem. We demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of our proposed approach via extensive numerical simulations on synthetic data, along with a simple least-squares based solution for the unwrapping stage, that recovers the original samples of $f$ (up to a global shift). It is shown to perform well at high levels of noise, when taking as input the denoised modulo $1$ samples. Finally, we also consider two other approaches for denoising the modulo 1 samples that leverage tools from Riemannian optimization on manifolds, including a Burer-Monteiro approach for a semidefinite programming relaxation of our formulation. For the two-dimensional version of the problem, which has applications in synthetic aperture radar interferometry (InSAR), we are able to solve instances of real-world data with a million sample points in under 10 seconds, on a personal laptop.

Over the past decades, numerous loss functions have been been proposed for a variety of supervised learning tasks, including regression, classification, ranking, and more generally structured prediction. Understanding the core principles and theoretical properties underpinning these losses is key to choose the right loss for the right problem, as well as to create new losses which combine their strengths. In this paper, we introduce Fenchel-Young losses, a generic way to construct a convex loss function for a regularized prediction function. We provide an in-depth study of their properties in a very broad setting, covering all the aforementioned supervised learning tasks, and revealing new connections between sparsity, generalized entropies, and separation margins. We show that Fenchel-Young losses unify many well-known loss functions and allow to create useful new ones easily. Finally, we derive efficient predictive and training algorithms, making Fenchel-Young losses appealing both in theory and practice.

High dimensional data often contain multiple facets, and several clustering patterns can co-exist under different variable subspaces, also known as the views. While multi-view clustering algorithms were proposed, the uncertainty quantification remains difficult --- a particular challenge is in the high complexity of estimating the cluster assignment probability under each view, and sharing information among views. In this article, we propose an approximate Bayes approach --- treating the similarity matrices generated over the views as rough first-stage estimates for the co-assignment probabilities; in its Kullback-Leibler neighborhood, we obtain a refined low-rank matrix, formed by the pairwise product of simplex coordinates. Interestingly, each simplex coordinate directly encodes the cluster assignment uncertainty. For multi-view clustering, we let each view draw a parameterization from a few candidates, leading to dimension reduction. With high model flexibility, the estimation can be efficiently carried out as a continuous optimization problem, hence enjoys gradient-based computation. The theory establishes the connection of this model to a random partition distribution under multiple views. Compared to single-view clustering approaches, substantially more interpretable results are obtained when clustering brains from a human traumatic brain injury study, using high-dimensional gene expression data.

Given a response $Y$ and a vector $X = (X^1, dots, X^d)$ of $d$ predictors, we investigate the problem of inferring direct causes of $Y$ among the vector $X$. Models for $Y$ that use all of its causal covariates as predictors enjoy the property of being invariant across different environments or interventional settings. Given data from such environments, this property has been exploited for causal discovery. Here, we extend this inference principle to situations in which some (discrete-valued) direct causes of $ Y $ are unobserved. Such cases naturally give rise to switching regression models. We provide sufficient conditions for the existence, consistency and asymptotic normality of the MLE in linear switching regression models with Gaussian noise, and construct a test for the equality of such models. These results allow us to prove that the proposed causal discovery method obtains asymptotic false discovery control under mild conditions. We provide an algorithm, make available code, and test our method on simulated data. It is robust against model violations and outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. We further apply our method to a real data set, where we show that it does not only output causal predictors, but also a process-based clustering of data points, which could be of additional interest to practitioners.