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1. Smoothness-Penalized Deconvolution (SPeD) of a Density Estimate

   https://doi.org/10.1080/01621459.2023.2259028  

   Kent, David; Ruppert, David (September 2023, Journal of the American Statistical Association)

   This paper addresses the deconvolution problem of estimating a square-integrable probability density from observations contaminated with additive measurement errors having a known density. The estimator begins with a density estimate of the contaminated observations and minimizes a reconstruction error penalized by an integrated squared m-th derivative. Theory for deconvolution has mainly focused on kernel- or wavelet-based techniques, but other methods including spline-based techniques and this smoothnesspenalized estimator have been found to outperform kernel methods in simulation studies. This paper fills in some of these gaps by establishing asymptotic guarantees for the smoothness-penalized approach. Consistency is established in mean integrated squared error, and rates of convergence are derived for Gaussian, Cauchy, and Laplace error densities, attaining some lower bounds already in the literature. The assumptions are weak for most results; the estimator can be used with a broader class of error densities than the deconvoluting kernel. Our application example estimates the density of the mean cytotoxicity of certain bacterial isolates under random sampling; this mean cytotoxicity can only be measured experimentally with additive error, leading to the deconvolution problem. We also describe a method for approximating the solution by a cubic spline, which reduces to a quadratic program. 

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2. Interval Estimation of Individual-Level Causal Effects Under Unobserved Confounding

   Kallus, Nathan; Mao, Xiaojie; Zhou, Angela (January 2019, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research)

   We study the problem of learning conditional average treatment effects (CATE) from observational data with unobserved confounders. The CATE function maps baseline covariates to individual causal effect predictions and is key for personalized assessments. Recent work has focused on how to learn CATE under unconfoundedness, i.e., when there are no unobserved confounders. Since CATE may not be identified when unconfoundedness is violated, we develop a functional interval estimator that predicts bounds on the individual causal effects under realistic violations of unconfoundedness. Our estimator takes the form of a weighted kernel estimator with weights that vary adversarially. We prove that our estimator is sharp in that it converges exactly to the tightest bounds possible on CATE when there may be unobserved confounders. Further, we study personalized decision rules derived from our estimator and prove that they achieve optimal minimax regret asymptotically. We assess our approach in a simulation study as well as demonstrate its application in the case of hormone replacement therapy by comparing conclusions from a real observational study and clinical trial. 

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3. Learning Interaction Kernels in Stochastic Systems of Interacting Particles from Multiple Trajectories

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s10208-021-09521-z  

   Lu, Fei; Maggioni, Mauro; Tang, Sui (April 2021, Foundations of Computational Mathematics)

   null (Ed.)

   Abstract We consider stochastic systems of interacting particles or agents, with dynamics determined by an interaction kernel, which only depends on pairwise distances. We study the problem of inferring this interaction kernel from observations of the positions of the particles, in either continuous or discrete time, along multiple independent trajectories. We introduce a nonparametric inference approach to this inverse problem, based on a regularized maximum likelihood estimator constrained to suitable hypothesis spaces adaptive to data. We show that a coercivity condition enables us to control the condition number of this problem and prove the consistency of our estimator, and that in fact it converges at a near-optimal learning rate, equal to the min–max rate of one-dimensional nonparametric regression. In particular, this rate is independent of the dimension of the state space, which is typically very high. We also analyze the discretization errors in the case of discrete-time observations, showing that it is of order 1/2 in terms of the time spacings between observations. This term, when large, dominates the sampling error and the approximation error, preventing convergence of the estimator. Finally, we exhibit an efficient parallel algorithm to construct the estimator from data, and we demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm with numerical tests on prototype systems including stochastic opinion dynamics and a Lennard-Jones model. 

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4. Biased Kernel Density Estimators for Chance Constrained Optimal Control Problems

   https://doi.org/10.23919/ACC45564.2020.9148040  

   Keil, Rachel E.; Miller, Alexander; Kumar, Mrinal; Rao, Anil V. (July 2020, 2020 American Control Conference)

   null (Ed.)

   A method is developed for transforming chance constrained optimization problems to a form numerically solvable. The transformation is accomplished by reformulating the chance constraints as nonlinear constraints using a method that combines the previously developed Split-Bernstein approximation and kernel density estimator (KDE) methods. The Split-Bernstein approximation in a particular form is a biased kernel density estimator. The bias of this kernel leads to a nonlinear approximation that does not violate the bounds of the original chance constraint. The method of applying biased KDEs to reformulate chance constraints as nonlinear constraints transforms the chance constrained optimization problem to a deterministic optimization problems that retains key properties of the chance constrained optimization problem and can be solved numerically. This method can be applied to chance constrained optimal control problems. As a result, the Split-Bernstein and Gaussian kernels are applied to a chance constrained optimal control problem and the results are compared. 

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5. High-Dimensional Principal Component Analysis with Heterogeneous Missingness

   https://doi.org/10.1111/rssb.12550  

   Zhu, Ziwei; Wang, Tengyao; Samworth, Richard_J (November 2022, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B: Statistical Methodology)

   Abstract We study the problem of high-dimensional Principal Component Analysis (PCA) with missing observations. In a simple, homogeneous observation model, we show that an existing observed-proportion weighted (OPW) estimator of the leading principal components can (nearly) attain the minimax optimal rate of convergence, which exhibits an interesting phase transition. However, deeper investigation reveals that, particularly in more realistic settings where the observation probabilities are heterogeneous, the empirical performance of the OPW estimator can be unsatisfactory; moreover, in the noiseless case, it fails to provide exact recovery of the principal components. Our main contribution, then, is to introduce a new method, which we call primePCA, that is designed to cope with situations where observations may be missing in a heterogeneous manner. Starting from the OPW estimator, primePCA iteratively projects the observed entries of the data matrix onto the column space of our current estimate to impute the missing entries, and then updates our estimate by computing the leading right singular space of the imputed data matrix. We prove that the error of primePCA converges to zero at a geometric rate in the noiseless case, and when the signal strength is not too small. An important feature of our theoretical guarantees is that they depend on average, as opposed to worst-case, properties of the missingness mechanism. Our numerical studies on both simulated and real data reveal that primePCA exhibits very encouraging performance across a wide range of scenarios, including settings where the data are not Missing Completely At Random. 

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