No Arabic abstract
Learning the latent network structure from large scale multivariate point process data is an important task in a wide range of scientific and business applications. For instance, we might wish to estimate the neuronal functional connectivity network based on spiking times recorded from a collection of neurons. To characterize the complex processes underlying the observed data, we propose a new and flexible class of nonstationary Hawkes processes that allow both excitatory and inhibitory effects. We estimate the latent network structure using an efficient sparse least squares estimation approach. Using a thinning representation, we establish concentration inequalities for the first and second order statistics of the proposed Hawkes process. Such theoretical results enable us to establish the non-asymptotic error bound and the selection consistency of the estimated parameters. Furthermore, we describe a least squares loss based statistic for testing if the background intensity is constant in time. We demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed method through simulation studies and an application to a neuron spike train data set.
The log-likelihood of a generative model often involves both positive and negative terms. For a temporal multivariate point process, the negative term sums over all the possible event types at each time and also integrates over all the possible times. As a result, maximum likelihood estimation is expensive. We show how to instead apply a version of noise-contrastive estimation---a general parameter estimation method with a less expensive stochastic objective. Our specific instantiation of this general idea works out in an interestingly non-trivial way and has provable guarantees for its optimality, consistency and efficiency. On several synthetic and real-world datasets, our method shows benefits: for the model to achieve the same level of log-likelihood on held-out data, our method needs considerably fewer function evaluations and less wall-clock time.
Time series datasets often contain heterogeneous signals, composed of both continuously changing quantities and discretely occurring events. The coupling between these measurements may provide insights into key underlying mechanisms of the systems under study. To better extract this information, we investigate the asymptotic statistical properties of coupling measures between continuous signals and point processes. We first introduce martingale stochastic integration theory as a mathematical model for a family of statistical quantities that include the Phase Locking Value, a classical coupling measure to characterize complex dynamics. Based on the martingale Central Limit Theorem, we can then derive the asymptotic Gaussian distribution of estimates of such coupling measure, that can be exploited for statistical testing. Second, based on multivariate extensions of this result and Random Matrix Theory, we establish a principled way to analyze the low rank coupling between a large number of point processes and continuous signals. For a null hypothesis of no coupling, we establish sufficient conditions for the empirical distribution of squared singular values of the matrix to converge, as the number of measured signals increases, to the well-known Marchenko-Pastur (MP) law, and the largest squared singular value converges to the upper end of the MPs support. This justifies a simple thresholding approach to assess the significance of multivariate coupling. Finally, we illustrate with simulations the relevance of our univariate and multivariate results in the context of neural time series, addressing how to reliably quantify the interplay between multi channel Local Field Potential signals and the spiking activity of a large population of neurons.
Gaussian Graphical models (GGM) are widely used to estimate the network structures in many applications ranging from biology to finance. In practice, data is often corrupted by latent confounders which biases inference of the underlying true graphical structure. In this paper, we compare and contrast two strategies for inference in graphical models with latent confounders: Gaussian graphical models with latent variables (LVGGM) and PCA-based removal of confounding (PCA+GGM). While these two approaches have similar goals, they are motivated by different assumptions about confounding. In this paper, we explore the connection between these two approaches and propose a new method, which combines the strengths of these two approaches. We prove the consistency and convergence rate for the PCA-based method and use these results to provide guidance about when to use each method. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methodology using both simulations and in two real-world applications.
It has become increasingly common to collect high-dimensional binary data; for example, with the emergence of new sampling techniques in ecology. In smaller dimensions, multivariate probit (MVP) models are routinely used for inferences. However, algorithms for fitting such models face issues in scaling up to high dimensions due to the intractability of the likelihood, involving an integral over a multivariate normal distribution having no analytic form. Although a variety of algorithms have been proposed to approximate this intractable integral, these approaches are difficult to implement and/or inaccurate in high dimensions. We propose a two-stage Bayesian approach for inference on model parameters while taking care of the uncertainty propagation between the stages. We use the special structure of latent Gaussian models to reduce the highly expensive computation involved in joint parameter estimation to focus inference on marginal distributions of model parameters. This essentially makes the method embarrassingly parallel for both stages. We illustrate performance in simulations and applications to joint species distribution modeling in ecology.
In many real-world problems of real-time monitoring high-dimensional streaming data, one wants to detect an undesired event or change quickly once it occurs, but under the sampling control constraint in the sense that one might be able to only observe or use selected components data for decision-making per time step in the resource-constrained environments. In this paper, we propose to incorporate multi-armed bandit approaches into sequential change-point detection to develop an efficient bandit change-point detection algorithm. Our proposed algorithm, termed Thompson-Sampling-Shiryaev-Roberts-Pollak (TSSRP), consists of two policies per time step: the adaptive sampling policy applies the Thompson Sampling algorithm to balance between exploration for acquiring long-term knowledge and exploitation for immediate reward gain, and the statistical decision policy fuses the local Shiryaev-Roberts-Pollak statistics to determine whether to raise a global alarm by sum shrinkage techniques. Extensive numerical simulations and case studies demonstrate the statistical and computational efficiency of our proposed TSSRP algorithm.