Mathematics

We study the phase synchronization problem with noisy measurements Y= z ??z ?�H +?W??C n?n , where z ??is an n -dimensional complex unit-modulus vector and W is a complex-valued Gaussian random matrix. It is assumed that each entry Y jk is observed with probability p . We prove that an SDP relaxation of the MLE achieves the error bound (1+o(1)) ? 2 2np under a normalized squared ??2 loss. This result matches the minimax lower bound of the problem, and even the leading constant is sharp. The analysis of the SDP is based on an equivalent non-convex programming whose solution can be characterized as a fixed point of the generalized power iteration lifted to a higher dimensional space. This viewpoint unifies the proofs of the statistical optimality of three different methods: MLE, SDP, and generalized power method. The technique is also applied to the analysis of the SDP for Z 2 synchronization, and we achieve the minimax optimal error exp(??1?�o(1)) np 2 ? 2 ) with a sharp constant in the exponent.

In this paper, we focus on isotropic and stationary sphere-cross-time random fields. We first introduce the class of spherical functional autoregressive-moving average processes (SPHARMA), which extend in a natural way the spherical functional autoregressions (SPHAR) recently studied in [8, 7]; more importantly, we then show that SPHAR and SPHARMA processes of sufficiently large order can be exploited to approximate every isotropic and stationary sphere-cross-time random field, thus generalizing to this infinite-dimensional framework some classical results on real-valued stationary processes. Further characterizations in terms of functional spectral representation theorems and Wold-like decompositions are also established.

Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD), a popular sampling algorithm, is often described as the kernelized gradient flow for the Kullback-Leibler divergence in the geometry of optimal transport. We introduce a new perspective on SVGD that instead views SVGD as the (kernelized) gradient flow of the chi-squared divergence which, we show, exhibits a strong form of uniform exponential ergodicity under conditions as weak as a Poincaré inequality. This perspective leads us to propose an alternative to SVGD, called Laplacian Adjusted Wasserstein Gradient Descent (LAWGD), that can be implemented from the spectral decomposition of the Laplacian operator associated with the target density. We show that LAWGD exhibits strong convergence guarantees and good practical performance.

If the rounding errors are assumed to be distributed independently from the intrinsic distribution of the random variable, the sample variance s 2 of the rounded variable is given by the sum of the true variance ? 2 and the variance of the rounding errors (which is equal to w 2 /12 where w is the size of the rounding window). Here the exact expressions for the sample variance of the rounded variables are examined and it is also discussed when the simple approximation s 2 = ? 2 + w 2 /12 can be considered valid. In particular, if the underlying distribution f belongs to a family of symmetric normalizable distributions such that f(x)= ? ?? F(u) where u=(x?��?/? , and μ and ? 2 are the mean and variance of the distribution, then the rounded sample variance scales like s 2 ?? ? 2 + w 2 /12)?��?Φ ??(?) as ??��? where Φ(?)= ?????��? du e iu? F(u) is the characteristic function of F(u) . It follows that, roughly speaking, the approximation is valid for a slowly-varying symmetric underlying distribution with its variance sufficiently larger than the size of the rounding unit.

In this paper, we generalize the property of local asymptotic normality (LAN) to an enlarged neighborhood, under the name of rescaled local asymptotic normality (RLAN). We obtain sufficient conditions for a regular parametric model to satisfy RLAN. We show that RLAN supports the construction of a statistically efficient estimator which maximizes a cubic approximation to the log-likelihood on this enlarged neighborhood. In the context of Monte Carlo inference, we find that this maximum cubic likelihood estimator can maintain its statistical efficiency in the presence of asymptotically increasing Monte Carlo error in likelihood evaluation.

The question of fast convergence in the classical problem of high dimensional linear regression has been extensively studied. Arguably, one of the fastest procedures in practice is Iterative Hard Thresholding (IHT). Still, IHT relies strongly on the knowledge of the true sparsity parameter s . In this paper, we present a novel fast procedure for estimation in the high dimensional linear regression. Taking advantage of the interplay between estimation, support recovery and optimization we achieve both optimal statistical accuracy and fast convergence. The main advantage of our procedure is that it is fully adaptive, making it more practical than state of the art IHT methods. Our procedure achieves optimal statistical accuracy faster than, for instance, classical algorithms for the Lasso. Moreover, we establish sharp optimal results for both estimation and support recovery. As a consequence, we present a new iterative hard thresholding algorithm for high dimensional linear regression that is scaled minimax optimal (achieves the estimation error of the oracle that knows the sparsity pattern if possible), fast and adaptive.

We consider different types of predictive intervals and ask whether they are elicitable, i.e. are unique minimizers of a loss or scoring function in expectation. The equal-tailed interval is elicitable, with a rich class of suitable loss functions, though subject to translation invariance, or positive homogeneity and differentiability, the Winkler interval score becomes a unique choice. The modal interval also is elicitable, with a sole consistent scoring function, up to equivalence. However, the shortest interval fails to be elicitable relative to practically relevant classes of distributions. These results provide guidance in interval forecast evaluation and support recent choices of performance measures in forecast competitions.

We derive a formula for optimal hard thresholding of the singular value decomposition in the presence of correlated additive noise; although it nominally involves unobservables, we show how to apply it even where the noise covariance structure is not a-priori known or is not independently estimable. The proposed method, which we call ScreeNOT, is a mathematically solid alternative to Cattell's ever-popular but vague Scree Plot heuristic from 1966. ScreeNOT has a surprising oracle property: it typically achieves exactly, in large finite samples, the lowest possible MSE for matrix recovery, on each given problem instance - i.e. the specific threshold it selects gives exactly the smallest achievable MSE loss among all possible threshold choices for that noisy dataset and that unknown underlying true low rank model. The method is computationally efficient and robust against perturbations of the underlying covariance structure. Our results depend on the assumption that the singular values of the noise have a limiting empirical distribution of compact support; this model, which is standard in random matrix theory, is satisfied by many models exhibiting either cross-row correlation structure or cross-column correlation structure, and also by many situations where there is inter-element correlation structure. Simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the method even at moderate matrix sizes. The paper is supplemented by ready-to-use software packages implementing the proposed algorithm.

In this paper, we consider an inference problem for the first order autoregressive process driven by a long memory stationary Gaussian process. Suppose that the covariance function of the noise can be expressed as $\abs{k}^{2H-2}$ times a function slowly varying at infinity. The fractional Gaussian noise and the fractional ARIMA model and some others Gaussian noise are special examples that satisfy this assumption. We propose a second moment estimator and prove the strong consistency and give the asymptotic distribution. Moreover, when the limit distribution is Gaussian, we give the upper Berry-Esséen bound by means of Fourth moment theorem.

We consider the problem of the estimation of the mean function of an inhomogeneous Poisson process when its intensity function is periodic. For the mean integrated squared error (MISE) there is a classical lower bound for all estimators and the empirical mean function attains that lower bound, thus it is asymptotically efficient. Following the ideas of the work by Golubev and Levit, we compare asymptotically efficient estimators and propose an estimator which is second order asymptotically efficient. Second order efficiency is done over Sobolev ellipsoids, following the idea of Pinsker.