arXiv subjects

Junwei Lu

Publications and source records attributed to Junwei Lu.

54 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Multi-source Learning via Completion of Block-wise Overlapping Noisy Matrices

Matrix completion has attracted attention in many fields, including statistics, applied mathematics, and electrical engineering. Most of the works focus on the independent sampling models under which the observed entries are sampled independently. Motivated by applications in the integration of knowledge graphs derived from multi-source biomedical data such as those from Electronic Health Records (EHR) and biomedical text, we propose the {\bf B}lock-wise {\bf O}verlapping {\bf N}oisy {\bf M}atrix {\bf I}ntegration (BONMI) to treat blockwise missingness of symmetric matrices representing relatedness between entity pairs. Our idea is to exploit the orthogonal Procrustes problem to align the eigenspace of the two sub-matrices, then complete the missing blocks by the inner product of the two low-rank components. Besides, we prove the statistical rate for the eigenspace of the underlying matrix, which is comparable to the rate under the independently missing assumption. Simulation studies show that the method performs well under a variety of configurations. In the real data analysis, the method is applied to two tasks: (i) the integrating of several point-wise mutual information matrices built by English EHR and Chinese medical text data, and (ii) the machine translation between English and Chinese medical concepts. Our method shows an advantage over existing methods.

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arXiv2021

Lagrangian Inference for Ranking Problems

We propose a novel combinatorial inference framework to conduct general uncertainty quantification in ranking problems. We consider the widely adopted Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model, where each item is assigned a positive preference score that determines the Bernoulli distributions of pairwise comparisons' outcomes. Our proposed method aims to infer general ranking properties of the BTL model. The general ranking properties include the "local" properties such as if an item is preferred over another and the "global" properties such as if an item is among the top $K$-ranked items. We further generalize our inferential framework to multiple testing problems where we control the false discovery rate (FDR), and apply the method to infer the top-$K$ ranked items. We also derive the information-theoretic lower bound to justify the minimax optimality of the proposed method. We conduct extensive numerical studies using both synthetic and real datasets to back up our theory.

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arXiv2021

Heteroskedastic and Imbalanced Deep Learning with Adaptive Regularization

Real-world large-scale datasets are heteroskedastic and imbalanced -- labels have varying levels of uncertainty and label distributions are long-tailed. Heteroskedasticity and imbalance challenge deep learning algorithms due to the difficulty of distinguishing among mislabeled, ambiguous, and rare examples. Addressing heteroskedasticity and imbalance simultaneously is under-explored. We propose a data-dependent regularization technique for heteroskedastic datasets that regularizes different regions of the input space differently. Inspired by the theoretical derivation of the optimal regularization strength in a one-dimensional nonparametric classification setting, our approach adaptively regularizes the data points in higher-uncertainty, lower-density regions more heavily. We test our method on several benchmark tasks, including a real-world heteroskedastic and imbalanced dataset, WebVision. Our experiments corroborate our theory and demonstrate a significant improvement over other methods in noise-robust deep learning.

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arXiv2020

Expert-Supervised Reinforcement Learning for Offline Policy Learning and Evaluation

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a promising approach for learning optimal policies in environments where direct exploration is expensive or unfeasible. However, the adoption of such policies in practice is often challenging, as they are hard to interpret within the application context, and lack measures of uncertainty for the learned policy value and its decisions. To overcome these issues, we propose an Expert-Supervised RL (ESRL) framework which uses uncertainty quantification for offline policy learning. In particular, we have three contributions: 1) the method can learn safe and optimal policies through hypothesis testing, 2) ESRL allows for different levels of risk averse implementations tailored to the application context, and finally, 3) we propose a way to interpret ESRL's policy at every state through posterior distributions, and use this framework to compute off-policy value function posteriors. We provide theoretical guarantees for our estimators and regret bounds consistent with Posterior Sampling for RL (PSRL). Sample efficiency of ESRL is independent of the chosen risk aversion threshold and quality of the behavior policy.

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arXiv2020

Combinatorial-Probabilistic Trade-Off: Community Properties Test in the Stochastic Block Models

In this paper, we propose an inferential framework testing the general community combinatorial properties of the stochastic block model. Instead of estimating the community assignments, we aim to test the hypothesis on whether a certain community property is satisfied. For instance, we propose to test whether a given set of nodes belong to the same community or whether different network communities have the same size. We propose a general inference framework that can be applied to all symmetric community properties. To ease the challenges caused by the combinatorial nature of communities properties, we develop a novel shadowing bootstrap testing method. By utilizing the symmetry, our method can find a shadowing representative of the true assignment and the number of assignments to be tested in the alternative can be largely reduced. In theory, we introduce a combinatorial distance between two community classes and show a combinatorial-probabilistic trade-off phenomenon in the community properties test. Our test is honest as long as the product of combinatorial distance between two communities and the probabilistic distance between two assignment probabilities is sufficiently large. On the other hand, we shows that such trade-off also exists in the information-theoretic lower bound of the community property test. We also implement numerical experiments on both the synthetic data and the protein interaction application to show the validity of our method.

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arXiv2020

Inference of Dynamic Graph Changes for Functional Connectome

Dynamic functional connectivity is an effective measure for the brain's responses to continuous stimuli. We propose an inferential method to detect the dynamic changes of brain networks based on time-varying graphical models. Whereas most existing methods focus on testing the existence of change points, the dynamics in the brain network offer more signals in many neuroscience studies. We propose a novel method to conduct hypothesis testing on changes in dynamic brain networks. We introduce a bootstrap statistic to approximate the supreme of the high-dimensional empirical processes over dynamically changing edges. Our simulations show that this framework can capture the change points with changed connectivity. Finally, we apply our method to a brain imaging dataset under a natural audio-video stimulus and illustrate that we are able to detect temporal changes in brain networks. The functions of the identified regions are consistent with specific emotional annotations, which are closely associated with changes inferred by our method.

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arXiv2019

On Tighter Generalization Bound for Deep Neural Networks: CNNs, ResNets, and Beyond

We establish a margin based data dependent generalization error bound for a general family of deep neural networks in terms of the depth and width, as well as the Jacobian of the networks. Through introducing a new characterization of the Lipschitz properties of neural network family, we achieve significantly tighter generalization bounds than existing results. Moreover, we show that the generalization bound can be further improved for bounded losses. Aside from the general feedforward deep neural networks, our results can be applied to derive new bounds for popular architectures, including convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and residual networks (ResNets). When achieving same generalization errors with previous arts, our bounds allow for the choice of larger parameter spaces of weight matrices, inducing potentially stronger expressive ability for neural networks. Numerical evaluation is also provided to support our theory.

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arXiv2019

Estimating and Inferring the Maximum Degree of Stimulus-Locked Time-Varying Brain Connectivity Networks

Neuroscientists have enjoyed much success in understanding brain functions by constructing brain connectivity networks using data collected under highly controlled experimental settings. However, these experimental settings bear little resemblance to our real-life experience in day-to-day interactions with the surroundings. To address this issue, neuroscientists have been measuring brain activity under natural viewing experiments in which the subjects are given continuous stimuli, such as watching a movie or listening to a story. The main challenge with this approach is that the measured signal consists of both the stimulus-induced signal, as well as intrinsic-neural and non-neuronal signals. By exploiting the experimental design, we propose to estimate stimulus-locked brain network by treating non-stimulus-induced signals as nuisance parameters. In many neuroscience applications, it is often important to identify brain regions that are connected to many other brain regions during cognitive process. We propose an inferential method to test whether the maximum degree of the estimated network is larger than a pre-specific number. We prove that the type I error can be controlled and that the power increases to one asymptotically. Simulation studies are conducted to assess the performance of our method. Finally, we analyze a functional magnetic resonance imaging dataset obtained under the Sherlock Holmes movie stimuli.

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arXiv2018

Combinatorial Inference for Graphical Models

We propose a new family of combinatorial inference problems for graphical models. Unlike classical statistical inference where the main interest is point estimation or parameter testing, combinatorial inference aims at testing the global structure of the underlying graph. Examples include testing the graph connectivity, the presence of a cycle of certain size, or the maximum degree of the graph. To begin with, we develop a unified theory for the fundamental limits of a large family of combinatorial inference problems. We propose new concepts including structural packing and buffer entropies to characterize how the complexity of combinatorial graph structures impacts the corresponding minimax lower bounds. On the other hand, we propose a family of novel and practical structural testing algorithms to match the lower bounds. We provide thorough numerical results on both synthetic graphical models and brain networks to illustrate the usefulness of these proposed methods.

math.ST↗

arXiv2018

Kernel Meets Sieve: Post-Regularization Confidence Bands for Sparse Additive Model

We develop a novel procedure for constructing confidence bands for components of a sparse additive model. Our procedure is based on a new kernel-sieve hybrid estimator that combines two most popular nonparametric estimation methods in the literature, the kernel regression and the spline method, and is of interest in its own right. Existing methods for fitting sparse additive model are primarily based on sieve estimators, while the literature on confidence bands for nonparametric models are primarily based upon kernel or local polynomial estimators. Our kernel-sieve hybrid estimator combines the best of both worlds and allows us to provide a simple procedure for constructing confidence bands in high-dimensional sparse additive models. We prove that the confidence bands are asymptotically honest by studying approximation with a Gaussian process. Thorough numerical results on both synthetic data and real-world neuroscience data are provided to demonstrate the efficacy of the theory.

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arXiv2018

Post-Regularization Inference for Time-Varying Nonparanormal Graphical Models

We propose a novel class of time-varying nonparanormal graphical models, which allows us to model high dimensional heavy-tailed systems and the evolution of their latent network structures. Under this model, we develop statistical tests for presence of edges both locally at a fixed index value and globally over a range of values. The tests are developed for a high-dimensional regime, are robust to model selection mistakes and do not require commonly assumed minimum signal strength. The testing procedures are based on a high dimensional, debiasing-free moment estimator, which uses a novel kernel smoothed Kendall's tau correlation matrix as an input statistic. The estimator consistently estimates the latent inverse Pearson correlation matrix uniformly in both the index variable and kernel bandwidth. Its rate of convergence is shown to be minimax optimal. Our method is supported by thorough numerical simulations and an application to a neural imaging data set.

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arXiv2018

Symmetry, Saddle Points, and Global Optimization Landscape of Nonconvex Matrix Factorization

We propose a general theory for studying the \xl{landscape} of nonconvex \xl{optimization} with underlying symmetric structures \tz{for a class of machine learning problems (e.g., low-rank matrix factorization, phase retrieval, and deep linear neural networks)}. In specific, we characterize the locations of stationary points and the null space of Hessian matrices \xl{of the objective function} via the lens of invariant groups\removed{for associated optimization problems, including low-rank matrix factorization, phase retrieval, and deep linear neural networks}. As a major motivating example, we apply the proposed general theory to characterize the global \xl{landscape} of the \xl{nonconvex optimization in} low-rank matrix factorization problem. In particular, we illustrate how the rotational symmetry group gives rise to infinitely many nonisolated strict saddle points and equivalent global minima of the objective function. By explicitly identifying all stationary points, we divide the entire parameter space into three regions: ($\cR_1$) the region containing the neighborhoods of all strict saddle points, where the objective has negative curvatures; ($\cR_2$) the region containing neighborhoods of all global minima, where the objective enjoys strong convexity along certain directions; and ($\cR_3$) the complement of the above regions, where the gradient has sufficiently large magnitudes. We further extend our result to the matrix sensing problem. Such global landscape implies strong global convergence guarantees for popular iterative algorithms with arbitrary initial solutions.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2017

Inter-Subject Analysis: Inferring Sparse Interactions with Dense Intra-Graphs

We develop a new modeling framework for Inter-Subject Analysis (ISA). The goal of ISA is to explore the dependency structure between different subjects with the intra-subject dependency as nuisance. It has important applications in neuroscience to explore the functional connectivity between brain regions under natural stimuli. Our framework is based on the Gaussian graphical models, under which ISA can be converted to the problem of estimation and inference of the inter-subject precision matrix. The main statistical challenge is that we do not impose sparsity constraint on the whole precision matrix and we only assume the inter-subject part is sparse. For estimation, we propose to estimate an alternative parameter to get around the non-sparse issue and it can achieve asymptotic consistency even if the intra-subject dependency is dense. For inference, we propose an "untangle and chord" procedure to de-bias our estimator. It is valid without the sparsity assumption on the inverse Hessian of the log-likelihood function. This inferential method is general and can be applied to many other statistical problems, thus it is of independent theoretical interest. Numerical experiments on both simulated and brain imaging data validate our methods and theory.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2017

Adaptive Inferential Method for Monotone Graph Invariants

We consider the problem of undirected graphical model inference. In many applications, instead of perfectly recovering the unknown graph structure, a more realistic goal is to infer some graph invariants (e.g., the maximum degree, the number of connected subgraphs, the number of isolated nodes). In this paper, we propose a new inferential framework for testing nested multiple hypotheses and constructing confidence intervals of the unknown graph invariants under undirected graphical models. Compared to perfect graph recovery, our methods require significantly weaker conditions. This paper makes two major contributions: (i) Methodologically, for testing nested multiple hypotheses, we propose a skip-down algorithm on the whole family of monotone graph invariants (The invariants which are non-decreasing under addition of edges). We further show that the same skip-down algorithm also provides valid confidence intervals for the targeted graph invariants. (ii) Theoretically, we prove that the length of the obtained confidence intervals are optimal and adaptive to the unknown signal strength. We also prove generic lower bounds for the confidence interval length for various invariants. Numerical results on both synthetic simulations and a brain imaging dataset are provided to illustrate the usefulness of the proposed method.

math.ST↗

arXiv2016

Provable Sparse Tensor Decomposition

We propose a novel sparse tensor decomposition method, namely Tensor Truncated Power (TTP) method, that incorporates variable selection into the estimation of decomposition components. The sparsity is achieved via an efficient truncation step embedded in the tensor power iteration. Our method applies to a broad family of high dimensional latent variable models, including high dimensional Gaussian mixture and mixtures of sparse regressions. A thorough theoretical investigation is further conducted. In particular, we show that the final decomposition estimator is guaranteed to achieve a local statistical rate, and further strengthen it to the global statistical rate by introducing a proper initialization procedure. In high dimensional regimes, the obtained statistical rate significantly improves those shown in the existing non-sparse decomposition methods. The empirical advantages of TTP are confirmed in extensive simulated results and two real applications of click-through rate prediction and high-dimensional gene clustering.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2016

Nonparametric Heterogeneity Testing For Massive Data

A massive dataset often consists of a growing number of (potentially) heterogeneous sub-populations. This paper is concerned about testing various forms of heterogeneity arising from massive data. In a general nonparametric framework, a set of testing procedures are designed to accommodate a growing number of sub-populations, denoted as $s$, with computational feasibility. In theory, their null limit distributions are derived as being nearly Chi-square with diverging degrees of freedom as long as $s$ does not grow too fast. Interestingly, we find that a lower bound on $s$ needs to be set for obtaining a sufficiently powerful testing result, so-called "blessing of aggregation." As a by-produc, a type of homogeneity testing is also proposed with a test statistic being aggregated over all sub-populations. Numerical results are presented to support our theory.

math.ST↗

arXiv2015

Distributed Estimation and Inference with Statistical Guarantees

This paper studies hypothesis testing and parameter estimation in the context of the divide and conquer algorithm. In a unified likelihood based framework, we propose new test statistics and point estimators obtained by aggregating various statistics from $k$ subsamples of size $n/k$, where $n$ is the sample size. In both low dimensional and high dimensional settings, we address the important question of how to choose $k$ as $n$ grows large, providing a theoretical upper bound on $k$ such that the information loss due to the divide and conquer algorithm is negligible. In other words, the resulting estimators have the same inferential efficiencies and estimation rates as a practically infeasible oracle with access to the full sample. Thorough numerical results are provided to back up the theory.

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arXiv2015

Graphical Fermat's Principle and Triangle-Free Graph Estimation

We consider the problem of estimating undirected triangle-free graphs of high dimensional distributions. Triangle-free graphs form a rich graph family which allows arbitrary loopy structures but 3-cliques. For inferential tractability, we propose a graphical Fermat's principle to regularize the distribution family. Such principle enforces the existence of a distribution-dependent pseudo-metric such that any two nodes have a smaller distance than that of two other nodes who have a geodesic path include these two nodes. Guided by this principle, we show that a greedy strategy is able to recover the true graph. The resulting algorithm only requires a pairwise distance matrix as input and is computationally even more efficient than calculating the minimum spanning tree. We consider graph estimation problems under different settings, including discrete and nonparametric distribution families. Thorough numerical results are provided to illustrate the usefulness of the proposed method.

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