arXiv subjects

Rohan Hore

Publications and source records attributed to Rohan Hore.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Distribution-free inference on the number of changepoints

Suppose we are given an ordered sequence of independent data whose distribution changes $K$ times at unknown locations, for some unknown $K \geq 0$. In this paper, we study the problem of performing distribution-free inference on $K$. First, we show an impossibility result: any distribution-free upper confidence bound on $K$ must be trivial and uninformative. Then, using conformal $p$-values, and under only the assumption that the data segments induced by the changepoints are exchangeable (within themselves) and mutually independent, we construct a finite-sample valid lower confidence bound on $K$, which we call the Conformal LOwer bound on Changepoint Count (CLOCC). We show that CLOCC is the only feasible way to provide a lower bound on $K$ under the stated assumptions, a property we refer to as its universality. We provide practical guidelines for choosing score functions that yield efficient and tight lower bounds. We evaluate CLOCC in several synthetic and real-data experiments, where it provides informative lower bounds on $K$, demonstrating its practical applicability.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2026

Local permutation tests for conditional independence: an adaptive binning perspective

In this work, we study the problem of testing conditional independence between random variables $X$ and $Y$ given a confounder $Z$. The local permutation test (LPT) offers a principled approach to this problem by partitioning the $Z$-space into pre-specified bins, and permuting the $X$ and $Y$ data within each bin, to assess the significance of an observed test statistic. However, when the partitions are pre-fixed, the resulting partition can be poorly balanced, as some bins may contain most of the samples while others contain only a few. This motivates the use of data-adaptive binning strategies, such as equisized bins with a fixed (typically small) number of points. We study this natural and practically important extension of LPT, providing finite-sample bounds on the Type I error for an arbitrary test statistic, providing stronger validity results than previously known. We also show that LPT attains power comparable to the oracle likelihood ratio tests derived from the Neyman-Pearson lemma. Within a linear confounder model class, we further analyze the effect of bin size and demonstrate that constant bin sizes can match the performance of partitions with growing bin-size. These results, further supported by extensive numerical simulations, position the proposed data-adaptive strategy as both practically implementable and statistically efficient.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2026

Distribution-free root cause analysis

We study distribution-free root cause analysis in multi-stream data, where an evolving underlying system is observed through multiple data streams that may each undergo distributional changes at unknown timepoints. In such settings, the stream exhibiting the earliest change provides a natural starting point for investigating the underlying cause, which we refer to as the root-cause index. Leveraging conformal $p$-values, we propose a novel framework, Conformal Root Cause Analysis (CROC), which constructs finite-sample valid confidence sets for the root-cause index under minimal assumptions: the data streams are independent, and within each stream the pre- and post-change observations are sampled exchangeably from arbitrary and unknown distributions. We further establish a universality property, showing that any distribution-free method for root cause localization can be represented within the CROC framework. In addition, under mild regularity conditions and principled score design, our method yields asymptotically sharp confidence sets that efficiently isolate the root cause. We further extend CROC to efficiently handle cross-stream dependence when present. Extensive simulations demonstrate accurate localization of the root stream, supporting our theoretical guarantees.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2026

Online monotone density estimation and log-optimal calibration

We study the problem of online monotone density estimation, where density estimators must be constructed in a predictable manner from sequentially observed data. We propose two online estimators: an online analogue of the classical Grenander estimator, and an expert aggregation estimator inspired by exponential weighting methods from the online learning literature. In the well-specified stochastic setting, where the underlying density is monotone, we show that the expected cumulative log-likelihood gap between the online estimators and the true density admits an $O(n^{1/3})$ bound. We further establish a $\sqrt{n\log{n}}$ pathwise regret bound for the expert aggregation estimator relative to the best offline monotone estimator chosen in hindsight, under minimal regularity assumptions on the observed sequence. As an application of independent interest, we show that the problem of constructing log-optimal p-to-e calibrators for sequential hypothesis testing can be formulated as an online monotone density estimation problem. We adapt the proposed estimators to build empirically adaptive p-to-e calibrators and establish their optimality. Numerical experiments illustrate the theoretical results.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2026

Distribution-free two-sample testing with blurred total variation distance

Two-sample testing, where we aim to determine whether two distributions are equal or not equal based on samples from each one, is challenging if we cannot place assumptions on the properties of the two distributions. In particular, certifying equality of distributions, or even providing a tight upper bound on the total variation (TV) distance between the distributions, is impossible to achieve in a distribution-free regime. In this work, we examine the blurred TV distance, a relaxation of TV distance that enables us to perform inference without assumptions on the distributions. We provide theoretical guarantees for distribution-free upper and lower bounds on the blurred TV distance, and examine its properties in high dimensions.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2026

Conformal changepoint localization

We study the problem of offline changepoint localization in a distribution-free setting. One observes a vector of data with a single changepoint, assuming that the data before and after the changepoint are i.i.d. (or more generally exchangeable) from arbitrary and unknown distributions. The goal is to produce a finite-sample confidence set for the index at which the change occurs without making any other assumptions. Existing methods often rely on parametric assumptions, tail conditions, or asymptotic approximations, or only produce point estimates. In contrast, our distribution-free algorithm, CONformal CHangepoint localization (CONCH), only leverages exchangeability arguments to construct confidence sets with finite sample coverage. By proving a conformal Neyman--Pearson lemma, we derive principled score functions that yield informative (small) sets. Moreover, with such score functions, the normalized length of the confidence set shrinks to zero under weak assumptions. We also establish a universality result showing that any distribution-free changepoint localization method must be an instance of CONCH. Experiments suggest that CONCH delivers precise confidence sets even in challenging settings involving images or text.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2025

One-shot Conditional Sampling: MMD meets Nearest Neighbors

How can we generate samples from a conditional distribution that we never fully observe? This question arises across a broad range of applications in both modern machine learning and classical statistics, including image post-processing in computer vision, approximate posterior sampling in simulation-based inference, and conditional distribution modeling in complex data settings. In such settings, compared with unconditional sampling, additional feature information can be leveraged to enable more adaptive and efficient sampling. Building on this, we introduce Conditional Generator using MMD (CGMMD), a novel framework for conditional sampling. Unlike many contemporary approaches, our method frames the training objective as a simple, adversary-free direct minimization problem. A key feature of CGMMD is its ability to produce conditional samples in a single forward pass of the generator, enabling practical one-shot sampling with low test-time complexity. We establish rigorous theoretical bounds on the loss incurred when sampling from the CGMMD sampler, and prove convergence of the estimated distribution to the true conditional distribution. In the process, we also develop a uniform concentration result for nearest-neighbor based functionals, which may be of independent interest. Finally, we show that CGMMD performs competitively on synthetic tasks involving complex conditional densities, as well as on practical applications such as image denoising and image super-resolution.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2025

Testing conditional independence under isotonicity

We propose a test of the conditional independence of random variables $X$ and~$Y$ given~$Z$ under the additional assumption that $X$ is stochastically nondecreasing in~$Z$. The well-documented hardness of testing conditional independence means that some further restriction on the null hypothesis parameter space is required. In contrast to existing approaches based on parametric models, smoothness assumptions, or approximations to the conditional distribution of $X$ given $Z$ and/or $Y$ given $Z$, our test requires only the stochastic monotonicity assumption. Our procedure, called \textnormal{\texttt{PairSwap-ICI}}, determines the significance of a statistic by randomly swapping the $X$ values within ordered pairs of~$Z$ values. The matched pairs and the test statistic may depend on both $Y$ and $Z$, providing the analyst with significant flexibility in constructing a powerful test. Our test offers finite-sample Type~I error control, and provably achieves high power against a large class of alternatives. We validate our theoretical findings through a series of simulations and real data experiments.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2023

Conformal prediction with local weights: randomization enables local guarantees

In this work, we consider the problem of building distribution-free prediction intervals with finite-sample conditional coverage guarantees. Conformal prediction (CP) is an increasingly popular framework for building such intervals with distribution-free guarantees, but these guarantees only ensure marginal coverage: the probability of coverage is averaged over both the training and test data, meaning that there might be substantial undercoverage within certain subpopulations. Instead, ideally we would want to have local coverage guarantees that hold for each possible value of the test point's features. While the impossibility of achieving pointwise local coverage is well established in the literature, many variants of conformal prediction algorithm show favourable local coverage properties empirically. Relaxing the definition of local coverage can allow for a theoretical understanding of this empirical phenomenon. We propose randomly localized conformal prediction (RLCP), a method that builds on localized CP and weighted CP techniques to return prediction intervals that are not only marginally valid but also offer relaxed local coverage guarantees and validity under covariate shift. Through a series of simulations and real data experiments, we validate these coverage guarantees of RLCP while comparing it with the other local conformal prediction methods.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2022

Conformalized survival analysis with adaptive cutoffs

This paper introduces an assumption-lean method that constructs valid and efficient lower predictive bounds (LPBs) for survival times with censored data. We build on recent work by Cand\`es et al. (2021), whose approach first subsets the data to discard any data points with early censoring times, and then uses a reweighting technique (namely, weighted conformal inference (Tibshirani et al., 2019)) to correct for the distribution shift introduced by this subsetting procedure. For our new method, instead of constraining to a fixed threshold for the censoring time when subsetting the data, we allow for a covariate-dependent and data-adaptive subsetting step, which is better able to capture the heterogeneity of the censoring mechanism. As a result, our method can lead to LPBs that are less conservative and give more accurate information. We show that in the Type I right-censoring setting, if either of the censoring mechanism or the conditional quantile of survival time is well estimated, our proposed procedure achieves nearly exact marginal coverage, where in the latter case we additionally have approximate conditional coverage. We evaluate the validity and efficiency of our proposed algorithm in numerical experiments, illustrating its advantage when compared with other competing methods. Finally, our method is applied to a real dataset to generate LPBs for users' active times on a mobile app.

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arXiv2022

Robust and Efficient Parameter Estimation for Discretely Observed Stochastic Processes

In various practical situations, we encounter data from stochastic processes which can be efficiently modelled by an appropriate parametric model for subsequent statistical analyses. Unfortunately, the most common estimation and inference methods based on the maximum likelihood (ML) principle are susceptible to minor deviations from assumed model or data contamination due to their well known lack of robustness. Since the alternative non-parametric procedures often lose significant efficiency, in this paper, we develop a robust parameter estimation procedure for discretely observed data from a parametric stochastic process model which exploits the nice properties of the popular density power divergence measure in the framework of minimum distance inference. In particular, here we define the minimum density power divergence estimators (MDPDE) for the independent increment and the Markov processes. We establish the asymptotic consistency and distributional results for the proposed MDPDEs in these dependent stochastic process set-ups and illustrate their benefits over the usual ML estimator for common examples like Poisson process, drifted Brownian motion and auto-regressive models.

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