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Élisabeth Gassiat

Publications and source records attributed to Élisabeth Gassiat.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

On the impossibility of detecting a late change-point in the preferential attachment random graph model

We consider the problem of late change-point detection under the preferential attachment random graph model with time dependent attachment function. This can be formulated as a hypothesis testing problem where the null hypothesis corresponds to a preferential attachment model with a constant affine attachment parameter $δ_0$ and the alternative corresponds to a preferential attachment model where the affine attachment parameter changes from $δ_0$ to $δ_1$ at a time $τ_n = n - Δ_n$ where $0\leq Δ_n \leq n$ and $n$ is the size of the graph. It was conjectured in Bet et al. that when observing only the unlabeled graph, detection of the change is not possible for $Δ_n = o(n^{1/2})$. In this work, we make a step towards proving the conjecture by proving the impossibility of detecting the change when $Δ_n = o(n^{1/3})$. We also study change-point detection in the case where the labeled graph is observed and show that change-point detection is possible if and only if $Δ_n \to \infty$, thereby exhibiting a strong difference between the two settings.

math.ST↗

Variational excess risk bound for general state space models

In this paper, we consider variational autoencoders (VAE) for general state space models. We consider a backward factorization of the variational distributions to analyze the excess risk associated with VAE. Such backward factorizations were recently proposed to perform online variational learning and to obtain upper bounds on the variational estimation error. When independent trajectories of sequences are observed and under strong mixing assumptions on the state space model and on the variational distribution, we provide an oracle inequality explicit in the number of samples and in the length of the observation sequences. We then derive consequences of this theoretical result. In particular, when the data distribution is given by a state space model, we provide an upper bound for the Kullback-Leibler divergence between the data distribution and its estimator and between the variational posterior and the estimated state space posterior distributions.Under classical assumptions, we prove that our results can be applied to Gaussian backward kernels built with dense and recurrent neural networks.

stat.ME↗

Amortized backward variational inference in nonlinear state-space models

We consider the problem of state estimation in general state-space models using variational inference. For a generic variational family defined using the same backward decomposition as the actual joint smoothing distribution, we establish for the first time that, under mixing assumptions, the variational approximation of expectations of additive state functionals induces an error which grows at most linearly in the number of observations. This guarantee is consistent with the known upper bounds for the approximation of smoothing distributions using standard Monte Carlo methods. Moreover, we propose an amortized inference framework where a neural network shared over all times steps outputs the parameters of the variational kernels. We also study empirically parametrizations which allow analytical marginalization of the variational distributions, and therefore lead to efficient smoothing algorithms. Significant improvements are made over state-of-the art variational solutions, especially when the generative model depends on a strongly nonlinear and noninjective mixing function.

stat.ME↗

A truncation model for estimating Species Richness

We propose a truncation model for abundance distribution in the species richness estimation. This model is inherently semiparametric and incorporates an unknown truncation threshold between rare and abundant counts observations. Using the conditional likelihood, we derive a class of estimators for the parameters in the model by a stepwise maximisation. The species richness estimator is given by the integer maximising the binomial likelihood when all other parameters in the model are know. Under regularity conditions, we show that the estimators of the model parameters are asymptotically efficient. We recover the Chao$^{'}$s lower bound estimator of species richeness when the model is a unicomponent Poisson$^{'}$s model. So, it is an element of our class of estimators. In a simulation study, we show the performances of the proposed method and compare it to some others.

stat.ME↗

Minimax adaptive estimation of nonparametric hidden Markov models

We consider stationary hidden Markov models with finite state space and nonparametric modeling of the emission distributions. It has remained unknown until very recently that such models are identifiable. In this paper, we propose a new penalized least-squares esti-mator for the emission distributions which is statistically optimal and practically tractable. We prove a non asymptotic oracle inequality for our nonparametric estimator of the emission distributions. A consequence is that this new estimator is rate minimax adaptive up to a logarithmic term. Our methodology is based on projections of the emission distributions onto nested subspaces of increasing complexity. The popular spectral estimators are unable to achieve the optimal rate but may be used as initial points in our procedure. Simulations are given that show the improvement obtained when applying the least-squares minimization consecutively to the spectral estimation.

math.ST↗