arXiv subjects

Simon S. Du

Publications and source records attributed to Simon S. Du.

129 records · Page 8Linked to original sources

arXiv2017

Computationally Efficient Robust Estimation of Sparse Functionals

Many conventional statistical procedures are extremely sensitive to seemingly minor deviations from modeling assumptions. This problem is exacerbated in modern high-dimensional settings, where the problem dimension can grow with and possibly exceed the sample size. We consider the problem of robust estimation of sparse functionals, and provide a computationally and statistically efficient algorithm in the high-dimensional setting. Our theory identifies a unified set of deterministic conditions under which our algorithm guarantees accurate recovery. By further establishing that these deterministic conditions hold with high-probability for a wide range of statistical models, our theory applies to many problems of considerable interest including sparse mean and covariance estimation; sparse linear regression; and sparse generalized linear models.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2016

Efficient Nonparametric Smoothness Estimation

Sobolev quantities (norms, inner products, and distances) of probability density functions are important in the theory of nonparametric statistics, but have rarely been used in practice, partly due to a lack of practical estimators. They also include, as special cases, $L^2$ quantities which are used in many applications. We propose and analyze a family of estimators for Sobolev quantities of unknown probability density functions. We bound the bias and variance of our estimators over finite samples, finding that they are generally minimax rate-optimal. Our estimators are significantly more computationally tractable than previous estimators, and exhibit a statistical/computational trade-off allowing them to adapt to computational constraints. We also draw theoretical connections to recent work on fast two-sample testing. Finally, we empirically validate our estimators on synthetic data.

math.ST↗

arXiv2016

An Improved Gap-Dependency Analysis of the Noisy Power Method

We consider the noisy power method algorithm, which has wide applications in machine learning and statistics, especially those related to principal component analysis (PCA) under resource (communication, memory or privacy) constraints. Existing analysis of the noisy power method shows an unsatisfactory dependency over the "consecutive" spectral gap $(σ_k-σ_{k+1})$ of an input data matrix, which could be very small and hence limits the algorithm's applicability. In this paper, we present a new analysis of the noisy power method that achieves improved gap dependency for both sample complexity and noise tolerance bounds. More specifically, we improve the dependency over $(σ_k-σ_{k+1})$ to dependency over $(σ_k-σ_{q+1})$, where $q$ is an intermediate algorithm parameter and could be much larger than the target rank $k$. Our proofs are built upon a novel characterization of proximity between two subspaces that differ from canonical angle characterizations analyzed in previous works. Finally, we apply our improved bounds to distributed private PCA and memory-efficient streaming PCA and obtain bounds that are superior to existing results in the literature.

stat.ML↗