arXiv subjects

Dogyoon Song

Publications and source records attributed to Dogyoon Song.

21 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Deconvolution with Unknown Error Distribution Interpreted as Blind Isotonic Regression

Deconvolution is a statistical inverse problem to estimate the distribution of a random variable based on its noisy observations. Despite the extensive studies on the topic, deconvolution with unknown noise distribution remains as a notoriously hard problem. We propose a matrix-based viewpoint for collective deconvolution that subsumes the setup with repeated measurements as a special case. As the main result, we describe a simple algorithm that partially utilizes matrix structure to solve deconvolution problem and provide non-asymptotic error analysis for the algorithm. We show that the proposed algorithm achieves the minimax optimal rate for deconvolution in a restricted sense. We also remark the connection between the collective deconvolution and the so-called statistical seriation as a byproduct or our matrix viewpoint. We conjecture that the link suggests that collective deconvolution, as well as deconvolution with repeated measurements, is intrinsically much easier than usual deconvolution of a single distribution.

math.ST↗

arXiv2020

Learning RUMs: Reducing Mixture to Single Component via PCA

We consider the problem of learning a mixture of Random Utility Models (RUMs). Despite the success of RUMs in various domains and the versatility of mixture RUMs to capture the heterogeneity in preferences, there has been only limited progress in learning a mixture of RUMs from partial data such as pairwise comparisons. In contrast, there have been significant advances in terms of learning a single component RUM using pairwise comparisons. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap between mixture learning and single component learning of RUM by developing a `reduction' procedure. We propose to utilize PCA-based spectral clustering that simultaneously `de-noises' pairwise comparison data. We prove that our algorithm manages to cluster the partial data correctly (i.e., comparisons from the same RUM component are grouped in the same cluster) with high probability even when data is generated from a possibly {\em heterogeneous} mixture of well-separated {\em generic} RUMs. Both the time and the sample complexities scale polynomially in model parameters including the number of items. Two key features in the analysis are in establishing (1) a meaningful upper bound on the sub-Gaussian norm for RUM components embedded into the vector space of pairwise marginals and (2) the robustness of PCA with missing values in the $L_{2, \infty}$ sense, which might be of interest in their own right.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2019

Nearest Neighbors for Matrix Estimation Interpreted as Blind Regression for Latent Variable Model

We consider the setup of nonparametric {\em blind regression} for estimating the entries of a large $m \times n$ matrix, when provided with a small, random fraction of noisy measurements. We assume that all rows $u \in [m]$ and columns $i \in [n]$ of the matrix are associated to latent features $x_{\text{row}}(u)$ and $x_{\text{col}}(i)$ respectively, and the $(u,i)$-th entry of the matrix, $A(u, i)$ is equal to $f(x_{\text{row}}(u), x_{\text{col}}(i))$ for a latent function $f$. Given noisy observations of a small, random subset of the matrix entries, our goal is to estimate the unobserved entries of the matrix as well as to "de-noise" the observed entries. As the main result of this work, we introduce a nearest-neighbor-based estimation algorithm, and establish its consistency when the underlying latent function $f$ is Lipschitz, the underlying latent space is a bounded diameter Polish space, and the random fraction of observed entries in the matrix is at least $\max \left( m^{-1 + δ}, n^{-1/2 + δ} \right)$, for any $δ> 0$. As an important byproduct, our analysis sheds light into the performance of the classical collaborative filtering algorithm for matrix completion, which has been widely utilized in practice. Experiments with the MovieLens and Netflix datasets suggest that our algorithm provides a principled improvement over basic collaborative filtering and is competitive with matrix factorization methods. Our algorithm has a natural extension to the setting of tensor completion via flattening the tensor to matrix. When applied to the setting of image in-painting, which is a $3$-order tensor, we find that our approach is competitive with respect to state-of-art tensor completion algorithms across benchmark images.

math.ST↗