No Arabic abstract
We consider a design problem where experimental conditions (design points $X_i$) are presented in the form of a sequence of i.i.d. random variables, generated with an unknown probability measure $mu$, and only a given proportion $alphain(0,1)$ can be selected. The objective is to select good candidates $X_i$ on the fly and maximize a concave function $Phi$ of the corresponding information matrix. The optimal solution corresponds to the construction of an optimal bounded design measure $xi_alpha^*leq mu/alpha$, with the difficulty that $mu$ is unknown and $xi_alpha^*$ must be constructed online. The construction proposed relies on the definition of a threshold $tau$ on the directional derivative of $Phi$ at the current information matrix, the value of $tau$ being fixed by a certain quantile of the distribution of this directional derivative. Combination with recursive quantile estimation yields a nonlinear two-time-scale stochastic approximation method. It can be applied to very long design sequences since only the current information matrix and estimated quantile need to be stored. Convergence to an optimum design is proved. Various illustrative examples are presented.
To fast approximate maximum likelihood estimators with massive data, this paper studies the Optimal Subsampling Method under the A-optimality Criterion (OSMAC) for generalized linear models. The consistency and asymptotic normality of the estimator from a general subsampling algorithm are established, and optimal subsampling probabilities under the A- and L-optimality criteria are derived. Furthermore, using Frobenius norm matrix concentration inequalities, finite sample properties of the subsample estimator based on optimal subsampling probabilities are also derived. Since the optimal subsampling probabilities depend on the full data estimate, an adaptive two-step algorithm is developed. Asymptotic normality and optimality of the estimator from this adaptive algorithm are established. The proposed methods are illustrated and evaluated through numerical experiments on simulated and real datasets.
The use of heuristics to assess the convergence and compress the output of Markov chain Monte Carlo can be sub-optimal in terms of the empirical approximations that are produced. Typically a number of the initial states are attributed to burn in and removed, whilst the remainder of the chain is thinned if compression is also required. In this paper we consider the problem of retrospectively selecting a subset of states, of fixed cardinality, from the sample path such that the approximation provided by their empirical distribution is close to optimal. A novel method is proposed, based on greedy minimisation of a kernel Stein discrepancy, that is suitable for problems where heavy compression is required. Theoretical results guarantee consistency of the method and its effectiveness is demonstrated in the challenging context of parameter inference for ordinary differential equations. Software is available in the Stein Thinning package in Python, R and MATLAB.
Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC), also known as particle filters, has been widely accepted as a powerful computational tool for making inference with dynamical systems. A key step in SMC is resampling, which plays the role of steering the algorithm towards the future dynamics. Several strategies have been proposed and used in practice, including multinomial resampling, residual resampling (Liu and Chen 1998), optimal resampling (Fearnhead and Clifford 2003), stratified resampling (Kitagawa 1996), and optimal transport resampling (Reich 2013). We show that, in the one dimensional case, optimal transport resampling is equivalent to stratified resampling on the sorted particles, and they both minimize the resampling variance as well as the expected squared energy distance between the original and resampled empirical distributions; in the multidimensional case, the variance of stratified resampling after sorting particles using Hilbert curve (Gerber et al. 2019) in $mathbb{R}^d$ is $O(m^{-(1+2/d)})$, an improved rate compared to the original $O(m^{-(1+1/d)})$, where $m$ is the number of resampled particles. This improved rate is the lowest for ordered stratified resampling schemes, as conjectured in Gerber et al. (2019). We also present an almost sure bound on the Wasserstein distance between the original and Hilbert-curve-resampled empirical distributions. In light of these theoretical results, we propose the stratified multiple-descendant growth (SMG) algorithm, which allows us to explore the sample space more efficiently compared to the standard i.i.d. multiple-descendant sampling-resampling approach as measured by the Wasserstein metric. Numerical evidence is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
We introduce a new method for high-dimensional, online changepoint detection in settings where a $p$-variate Gaussian data stream may undergo a change in mean. The procedure works by performing likelihood ratio tests against simple alternatives of different scales in each coordinate, and then aggregating test statistics across scales and coordinates. The algorithm is online in the sense that both its storage requirements and worst-case computational complexity per new observation are independent of the number of previous observations; in practice, it may even be significantly faster than this. We prove that the patience, or average run length under the null, of our procedure is at least at the desired nominal level, and provide guarantees on its response delay under the alternative that depend on the sparsity of the vector of mean change. Simulations confirm the practical effectiveness of our proposal, which is implemented in the R package ocd, and we also demonstrate its utility on a seismology data set.
Nonuniform subsampling methods are effective to reduce computational burden and maintain estimation efficiency for massive data. Existing methods mostly focus on subsampling with replacement due to its high computational efficiency. If the data volume is so large that nonuniform subsampling probabilities cannot be calculated all at once, then subsampling with replacement is infeasible to implement. This paper solves this problem using Poisson subsampling. We first derive optimal Poisson subsampling probabilities in the context of quasi-likelihood estimation under the A- and L-optimality criteria. For a practically implementable algorithm with approximated optimal subsampling probabilities, we establish the consistency and asymptotic normality of the resultant estimators. To deal with the situation that the full data are stored in different blocks or at multiple locations, we develop a distributed subsampling framework, in which statistics are computed simultaneously on smaller partitions of the full data. Asymptotic properties of the resultant aggregated estimator are investigated. We illustrate and evaluate the proposed strategies through numerical experiments on simulated and real data sets.