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In this paper we develop a nonparametric maximum likelihood estimate of the mixing distribution of the parameters of a linear stochastic dynamical system. This includes, for example, pharmacokinetic population models with process and measurement noise that are linear in the state vector, input vector and the process and measurement noise vectors. Most research in mixing distributions only considers measurement noise. The advantages of the models with process noise are that, in addition to the measurements errors, the uncertainties in the model itself are taken into the account. For example, for deterministic pharmacokinetic models, errors in dose amounts, administration times, and timing of blood samples are typically not included. For linear stochastic models, we use linear Kalman-Bucy filtering to calculate the likelihood of the observations and then employ a nonparametric adaptive grid algorithm to find the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimate of the mixing distribution. We then use the directional derivatives of the estimated mixing distribution to show that the result found attains a global maximum. A simple example using a one compartment pharmacokinetic linear stochastic model is given. In addition to population pharmacokinetics, this research also applies to empirical Bayes estimation.
In this paper, we consider modeling missing dynamics with a nonparametric non-Markovian model, constructed using the theory of kernel embedding of conditional distributions on appropriate Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces (RKHS), equipped with orthonormal basis functions. Depending on the choice of the basis functions, the resulting closure model from this nonparametric modeling formulation is in the form of parametric model. This suggests that the success of various parametric modeling approaches that were proposed in various domains of applications can be understood through the RKHS representations. When the missing dynamical terms evolve faster than the relevant observable of interest, the proposed approach is consistent with the effective dynamics derived from the classical averaging theory. In the linear Gaussian case without the time-scale gap, we will show that the proposed non-Markovian model with a very long memory yields an accurate estimation of the nontrivial autocovariance function for the relevant variable of the full dynamics. Supporting numerical results on instructive nonlinear dynamics show that the proposed approach is able to replicate high-dimensional missing dynamical terms on problems with and without the separation of temporal scales.
Inference on unknown quantities in dynamical systems via observational data is essential for providing meaningful insight, furnishing accurate predictions, enabling robust control, and establishing appropriate designs for future experiments. Merging mathematical theory with empirical measurements in a statistically coherent way is critical and challenges abound, e.g.,: ill-posedness of the parameter estimation problem, proper regularization and incorporation of prior knowledge, and computational limitations on full uncertainty qualification. To address these issues, we propose a new method for learning parameterized dynamical systems from data. In many ways, our proposal turns the canonical framework on its head. We first fit a surrogate stochastic process to observational data, enforcing prior knowledge (e.g., smoothness), and coping with challenging data features like heteroskedasticity, heavy tails and censoring. Then, samples of the stochastic process are used as surrogate data and point estimates are computed via ordinary point estimation methods in a modular fashion. An attractive feature of this approach is that it is fully Bayesian and simultaneously parallelizable. We demonstrate the advantages of our new approach on a predator prey simulation study and on a real world application involving within-host influenza virus infection data paired with a viral kinetic model.
We consider a dynamical system with two sources of uncertainties: (1) parameterized input with a known probability distribution and (2) stochastic input-to-response (ItR) function with heteroscedastic randomness. Our purpose is to efficiently quantify the extreme response probability when the ItR function is expensive to evaluate. The problem setup arises often in physics and engineering problems, with randomness in ItR coming from either intrinsic uncertainties (say, as a solution to a stochastic equation) or additional (critical) uncertainties that are not incorporated in the input parameter space. To reduce the required sampling numbers, we develop a sequential Bayesian experimental design method leveraging the variational heteroscedastic Gaussian process regression (VHGPR) to account for the stochastic ItR, along with a new criterion to select the next-best samples sequentially. The validity of our new method is first tested in two synthetic problems with the stochastic ItR functions defined artificially. Finally, we demonstrate the application of our method to an engineering problem of estimating the extreme ship motion probability in ensemble of wave groups, where the uncertainty in ItR naturally originates from the uncertain initial condition of ship motion in each wave group.
A nonparametric Bayes approach is proposed for the problem of estimating a sparse sequence based on Gaussian random variables. We adopt the popular two-group prior with one component being a point mass at zero, and the other component being a mixture of Gaussian distributions. Although the Gaussian family has been shown to be suboptimal for this problem, we find that Gaussian mixtures, with a proper choice on the means and mixing weights, have the desired asymptotic behavior, e.g., the corresponding posterior concentrates on balls with the desired minimax rate. To achieve computation efficiency, we propose to obtain the posterior distribution using a deterministic variational algorithm. Empirical studies on several benchmark data sets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed algorithm compared to other alternatives.
Mutual information is a well-known tool to measure the mutual dependence between variables. In this paper, a Bayesian nonparametric estimation of mutual information is established by means of the Dirichlet process and the $k$-nearest neighbor distance. As a direct outcome of the estimation, an easy-to-implement test of independence is introduced through the relative belief ratio. Several theoretical properties of the approach are presented. The procedure is investigated through various examples where the results are compared to its frequentist counterpart and demonstrate a good performance.