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This work affords new insights into Bayesian CART in the context of structured wavelet shrinkage. The main thrust is to develop a formal inferential framework for Bayesian tree-based regression. We reframe Bayesian CART as a g-type prior which departs from the typical wavelet product priors by harnessing correlation induced by the tree topology. The practically used Bayesian CART priors are shown to attain adaptive near rate-minimax posterior concentration in the supremum norm in regression models. For the fundamental goal of uncertainty quantification, we construct adaptive confidence bands for the regression function with uniform coverage under self-similarity. In addition, we show that tree-posteriors enable optimal inference in the form of efficient confidence sets for smooth functionals of the regression function.
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 investigate the frequentist coverage properties of credible sets resulting in from Gaussian process priors with squared exponential covariance kernel. First we show that by selecting the scaling hyper-parameter using the maximum marginal likelihood estimator in the (slightly modified) squared exponential covariance kernel the corresponding credible sets will provide overconfident, misleading uncertainty statements for a large, representative subclass of the functional parameters in context of the Gaussian white noise model. Then we show that by either blowing up the credible sets with a logarithmic factor or modifying the maximum marginal likelihood estimator with a logarithmic term one can get reliable uncertainty statement and adaptive size of the credible sets under some additional restriction. Finally we demonstrate on a numerical study that the derived negative and positive results extend beyond the Gaussian white noise model to the nonparametric regression and classification models for small sample sizes as well.
Within a Bayesian statistical framework using the standard Skyrme-Hartree-Fcok model, the maximum a posteriori (MAP) values and uncertainties of nuclear matter incompressibility and isovector interaction parameters are inferred from the experimental data of giant resonances and neutron-skin thicknesses of typical heavy nuclei. With the uncertainties of the isovector interaction parameters constrained by the data of the isovector giant dipole resonance and the neutron-skin thickness, we have obtained $K_0 = 223_{-8}^{+7}$ MeV at 68% confidence level using the data of the isoscalar giant monopole resonance in $^{208}$Pb measured at the Research Center for Nuclear Physics (RCNP), Japan, and at the Texas A&M University (TAMU), USA. Although the corresponding $^{120}$Sn data gives a MAP value for $K_0$ about 5 MeV smaller than the $^{208}$Pb data, there are significant overlaps in their posterior probability distribution functions.
We consider the problem of uncertainty quantification for an unknown low-rank matrix $mathbf{X}$, given a partial and noisy observation of its entries. This quantification of uncertainty is essential for many real-world problems, including image processing, satellite imaging, and seismology, providing a principled framework for validating scientific conclusions and guiding decision-making. However, existing literature has largely focused on the completion (i.e., point estimation) of the matrix $mathbf{X}$, with little work on investigating its uncertainty. To this end, we propose in this work a new Bayesian modeling framework, called BayeSMG, which parametrizes the unknown $mathbf{X}$ via its underlying row and column subspaces. This Bayesian subspace parametrization allows for efficient posterior inference on matrix subspaces, which represents interpretable phenomena in many applications. This can then be leveraged for improved matrix recovery. We demonstrate the effectiveness of BayeSMG over existing Bayesian matrix recovery methods in numerical experiments and a seismic sensor network application.
Equation learning aims to infer differential equation models from data. While a number of studies have shown that differential equation models can be successfully identified when the data are sufficiently detailed and corrupted with relatively small amounts of noise, the relationship between observation noise and uncertainty in the learned differential equation models remains unexplored. We demonstrate that for noisy data sets there exists great variation in both the structure of the learned differential equation models as well as the parameter values. We explore how to combine data sets to quantify uncertainty in the learned models, and at the same time draw mechanistic conclusions about the target differential equations. We generate noisy data using a stochastic agent-based model and combine equation learning methods with approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) to show that the correct differential equation model can be successfully learned from data, while a quantification of uncertainty is given by a posterior distribution in parameter space.