No Arabic abstract
Let $(X,Y)$ be a random variable consisting of an observed feature vector $Xin mathcal{X}$ and an unobserved class label $Yin {1,2,...,L}$ with unknown joint distribution. In addition, let $mathcal{D}$ be a training data set consisting of $n$ completely observed independent copies of $(X,Y)$. Usual classification procedures provide point predictors (classifiers) $widehat{Y}(X,mathcal{D})$ of $Y$ or estimate the conditional distribution of $Y$ given $X$. In order to quantify the certainty of classifying $X$ we propose to construct for each $theta =1,2,...,L$ a p-value $pi_{theta}(X,mathcal{D})$ for the null hypothesis that $Y=theta$, treating $Y$ temporarily as a fixed parameter. In other words, the point predictor $widehat{Y}(X,mathcal{D})$ is replaced with a prediction region for $Y$ with a certain confidence. We argue that (i) this approach is advantageous over traditional approaches and (ii) any reasonable classifier can be modified to yield nonparametric p-values. We discuss issues such as optimality, single use and multiple use validity, as well as computational and graphical aspects.
Goods formula and Fishers method are frequently used for combining independent P-values. Interestingly, the equivalent of Goods formula already emerged in 1910 and mathematical expressions relevant to even more general situations have been repeatedly derived, albeit in different context. We provide here a novel derivation and show how the analytic formula obtained reduces to the two aforementioned ones as special cases. The main novelty of this paper, however, is the explicit treatment of nearly degenerate weights, which are known to cause numerical instabilities. We derive a controlled expansion, in powers of differences in inverse weights, that provides both accurate statistics and stable numerics.
Bayesian optimization is a class of global optimization techniques. It regards the underlying objective function as a realization of a Gaussian process. Although the outputs of Bayesian optimization are random according to the Gaussian process assumption, quantification of this uncertainty is rarely studied in the literature. In this work, we propose a novel approach to assess the output uncertainty of Bayesian optimization algorithms, in terms of constructing confidence regions of the maximum point or value of the objective function. These regions can be computed efficiently, and their confidence levels are guaranteed by newly developed uniform error bounds for sequential Gaussian process regression. Our theory provides a unified uncertainty quantification framework for all existing sequential sampling policies and stopping criteria.
We develop new approaches in multi-class settings for constructing proper scoring rules and hinge-like losses and establishing corresponding regret bounds with respect to the zero-one or cost-weighted classification loss. Our construction of losses involves deriving new inverse mappings from a concave generalized entropy to a loss through the use of a convex dissimilarity function related to the multi-distribution $f$-divergence. Moreover, we identify new classes of multi-class proper scoring rules, which also recover and reveal interesting relationships between various composite losses currently in use. We establish new classification regret bounds in general for multi-class proper scoring rules by exploiting the Bregman divergences of the associated generalized entropies, and, as applications, provide simple meaningful regret bounds for two specific classes of proper scoring rules. Finally, we derive new hinge-like convex losses, which are tighter convex extensions than related hinge-like losses and geometrically simpler with fewer non-differentiable edges, while achieving similar regret bounds. We also establish a general classification regret bound for all losses which induce the same generalized entropy as the zero-one loss.
We investigate the problem of testing whether $d$ random variables, which may or may not be continuous, are jointly (or mutually) independent. Our method builds on ideas of the two variable Hilbert-Schmidt independence criterion (HSIC) but allows for an arbitrary number of variables. We embed the $d$-dimensional joint distribution and the product of the marginals into a reproducing kernel Hilbert space and define the $d$-variable Hilbert-Schmidt independence criterion (dHSIC) as the squared distance between the embeddings. In the population case, the value of dHSIC is zero if and only if the $d$ variables are jointly independent, as long as the kernel is characteristic. Based on an empirical estimate of dHSIC, we define three different non-parametric hypothesis tests: a permutation test, a bootstrap test and a test based on a Gamma approximation. We prove that the permutation test achieves the significance level and that the bootstrap test achieves pointwise asymptotic significance level as well as pointwise asymptotic consistency (i.e., it is able to detect any type of fixed dependence in the large sample limit). The Gamma approximation does not come with these guarantees; however, it is computationally very fast and for small $d$, it performs well in practice. Finally, we apply the test to a problem in causal discovery.
We consider the problem of undirected graphical model inference. In many applications, instead of perfectly recovering the unknown graph structure, a more realistic goal is to infer some graph invariants (e.g., the maximum degree, the number of connected subgraphs, the number of isolated nodes). In this paper, we propose a new inferential framework for testing nested multiple hypotheses and constructing confidence intervals of the unknown graph invariants under undirected graphical models. Compared to perfect graph recovery, our methods require significantly weaker conditions. This paper makes two major contributions: (i) Methodologically, for testing nested multiple hypotheses, we propose a skip-down algorithm on the whole family of monotone graph invariants (The invariants which are non-decreasing under addition of edges). We further show that the same skip-down algorithm also provides valid confidence intervals for the targeted graph invariants. (ii) Theoretically, we prove that the length of the obtained confidence intervals are optimal and adaptive to the unknown signal strength. We also prove generic lower bounds for the confidence interval length for various invariants. Numerical results on both synthetic simulations and a brain imaging dataset are provided to illustrate the usefulness of the proposed method.