Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Chathurika S Abeykoon

Publications and source records attributed to Chathurika S Abeykoon.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Approximation, Consistency, and Prediction in Generalized Neural Network Mixed Models for Longitudinal and Clustered Data

Generalized neural network mixed models (GNMMs) combine neural networks and mixed-effects models to analyze longitudinal and clustered data. Although GNMMs have shown good predictive performance in practice, their statistical properties are not well understood. Therefore, this paper studies several important properties of GNMM and provides theoretical support for its use. First, we show that the neural-network component can approximate an unknown nonlinear fixed-effect function arbitrarily well and establish consistency of the fitted neural- network function for its population target within a given network class. Next, we establish consistency of random-effect estimation under increasing within-subject information and show that the GNMM predictor converges to the true predictor. We then prove consistency of the conditional mean function and show that the excess mean squared prediction error (MSPE) relative to the oracle prediction error converges to zero. We conduct simulation studies to examine nonlinear fixed-effect recovery, random-effect estimation, predictor and conditional mean estimation, and excess prediction error under different numbers of subjects and repeated observations. We also apply GNMM to a longitudinal schizophrenia dataset to predict continuous and binary depression outcomes using smartphone- based behavioral measurements and compare its predictive performance with generalized linear mixed models and conventional artificial neural networks. Both the theoretical and empirical results demonstrate that GNMM provides a flexible framework for modeling nonlinear longitudinal and clustered data. These findings provide a statistical foundation for GNMM prediction and support future methodological developments.

stat.ME↗

On the Reliability of Generative Augmentation: A Wasserstein-Based Theoretical and Empirical Study

Generative data augmentation is widely used to mitigate class imbalance, yet its theoretical effect on downstream generalization remains poorly understood. In this work, we develop a statistical framework for conditional generative augmentation and analyze its impact on classification risk. We formalize augmentation as a distribution-mixing process and show that the resulting risk distortion is controlled by both the augmentation strength and the class-conditional Wasserstein discrepancy between real and generated distributions. We further derive a capacity-dependent generalization bound based on Rademacher complexity, revealing an explicit trade-off between hypothesis complexity, augmentation intensity, and generative fidelity. Empirically, we evaluate the framework on binary and multiclass imbalanced classification tasks using Conditional GAN and Conditional WGAN-GP augmentation. Across datasets, CWGAN-GP consistently achieves lower Wasserstein discrepancies than CGAN, indicating improved distributional fidelity. However, improved fidelity does not necessarily translate into superior classification performance, with classical oversampling methods often remaining competitive. These findings support the central theoretical prediction that augmentation reliability is governed by distributional approximation error rather than predictive performance alone. Overall, this work establishes generative augmentation as a distributional perturbation process whose reliability can be quantified through Wasserstein-based measures and supported by finite-sample generalization guarantees. The proposed framework provides a principled foundation for evaluating synthetic data quality beyond classification accuracy alone.

stat.ML↗

The Double Descent Behavior in Two Layer Neural Network for Binary Classification

Recent studies observed a surprising concept on model test error called the double descent phenomenon, where the increasing model complexity decreases the test error first and then the error increases and decreases again. To observe this, we work on a two layer neural network model with a ReLU activation function designed for binary classification under supervised learning. Our aim is to observe and investigate the mathematical theory behind the double descent behavior of model test error for varying model sizes. We quantify the model size by the ratio of number of training samples to the dimension of the model. Due to the complexity of the empirical risk minimization procedure, we use the Convex Gaussian Min Max Theorem to find a suitable candidate for the global training loss.

stat.ML↗