More Like this

1. Sample Complexity Analysis and Self-regularization in Identification of Over-parameterized ARX Models

   Du, Zhe; Liu, Zexiang; Weitz, Jack; Ozay, Necmiye (January 2022, IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC))

   AutoRegressive eXogenous (ARX) models form one of the most important model classes in control theory, econometrics, and statistics, but they are yet to be understood in terms of their finite sample identification analysis. The technical challenges come from the strong statistical dependency not only between data samples at different time instances but also between elements within each individual sample. In this work, for ARX models with potentially unknown orders, we study how ordinary least squares (OLS) estimator performs in terms of identifying model parameters from data collected from either a single length-T trajectory or N i.i.d. trajectories. Our main results show that as long as the orders of the model are chosen optimistically, i.e., we are learning an over-parameterized model compared to the ground truth ARX, the OLS will converge with the optimal rate O(1/√T) (or O(1/√N)) to the true (low-order) ARX parameters. This occurs without the aid of any regularization, thus is referred to as self-regularization. Our results imply that the oracle knowledge of the true orders and usage of regularizers are not necessary in learning ARX models — over-parameterization is all you need 

   more » « less
2. Robust estimation for linear panel data models

   https://doi.org/10.1002/sim.8732  

   Hamiye_Beyaztas, Beste; Bandyopadhyay, Soutir (September 2020, Statistics in Medicine)

   In different fields of applications including, but not limited to, behavioral, environmental, medical sciences, and econometrics, the use of panel data regression models has become increasingly popular as a general framework for making meaningful statistical inferences. However, when the ordinary least squares (OLS) method is used to estimate the model parameters, presence of outliers may significantly alter the adequacy of such models by producing biased and inefficient estimates. In this work, we propose a new, weighted likelihood based robust estimation procedure for linear panel data models with fixed and random effects. The finite sample performances of the proposed estimators have been illustrated through an extensive simulation study as well as with an application to blood pressure dataset. Our thorough study demonstrates that the proposed estimators show significantly better performances over the traditional methods in the presence of outliers and produce competitive results to the OLS based estimates when no outliers are present in the dataset. 

   more » « less
3. Adaptive data collection for robust learning across multiple distributions

   Zang, Chengbo; Turkcan, Mehme; Zussman, Gil; Kostic, Zoran; Ghaderi, Javad (May 2025, in Proc. ICML’25, 2025)

   We propose a framework for adaptive data collection aimed at robust learning in multi-distribution scenarios under a fixed data collection budget. In each round, the algorithm selects a distribution source to sample from for data collection and updates the model parameters accordingly. The objective is to find the model parameters that minimize the expected loss across all the data sources. Our approach integrates upper-confidence-bound (UCB) sampling with online gradient descent (OGD) to dynamically collect and annotate data from multiple sources. By bridging online optimization and multi-armed bandits, we provide theoretical guarantees for our UCB-OGD approach, demonstrating that it achieves a minimax regret of O(T 1 2 (K ln T) 1 2 ) over K data sources after T rounds. We further provide a lower bound showing that the result is optimal up to a ln T factor. Extensive evaluations on standard datasets and a real-world testbed for object detection in smartcity intersections validate the consistent performance improvements of our method compared to baselines such as random sampling and various active learning methods. 

   more » « less
4. Stochastic Contextual Bandits with Long Horizon Rewards

   https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v37i8.26140  

   Qin, Yuzhen; Li, Yingcong; Pasqualetti, Fabio; Fazel, Maryam; Oymak, Samet (June 2023, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   The growing interest in complex decision-making and language modeling problems highlights the importance of sample-efficient learning over very long horizons. This work takes a step in this direction by investigating contextual linear bandits where the current reward depends on at most s prior actions and contexts (not necessarily consecutive), up to a time horizon of h. In order to avoid polynomial dependence on h, we propose new algorithms that leverage sparsity to discover the dependence pattern and arm parameters jointly. We consider both the data-poor (T= h) regimes and derive respective regret upper bounds O(d square-root(sT) +min(q, T) and O( square-root(sdT) ), with sparsity s, feature dimension d, total time horizon T, and q that is adaptive to the reward dependence pattern. Complementing upper bounds, we also show that learning over a single trajectory brings inherent challenges: While the dependence pattern and arm parameters form a rank-1 matrix, circulant matrices are not isometric over rank-1 manifolds and sample complexity indeed benefits from the sparse reward dependence structure. Our results necessitate a new analysis to address long-range temporal dependencies across data and avoid polynomial dependence on the reward horizon h. Specifically, we utilize connections to the restricted isometry property of circulant matrices formed by dependent sub-Gaussian vectors and establish new guarantees that are also of independent interest. 

   more » « less
5. Automatic Classifiers as Scientific Instruments: One Step Further Away from Ground-Truth

   Whitehill, Jacob; Ramakrishnan, Anand (January 2019, International Conference on Machine Learning)

   Automatic machine learning-based detectors of various psychological and social phenomena (e.g., emotion, stress, engagement) have great potential to advance basic science. However, when a detector d is trained to approximate an existing measurement tool (e.g., a questionnaire, observation protocol), then care must be taken when interpreting measurements collected using d since they are one step further removed from the under- lying construct. We examine how the accuracy of d, as quantified by the correlation q of d’s out- puts with the ground-truth construct U, impacts the estimated correlation between U (e.g., stress) and some other phenomenon V (e.g., academic performance). In particular: (1) We show that if the true correlation between U and V is r, then the expected sample correlation, over all vectors T n whose correlation with U is q, is qr. (2) We derive a formula for the probability that the sample correlation (over n subjects) using d is positive given that the true correlation is negative (and vice-versa); this probability can be substantial (around 20 - 30%) for values of n and q that have been used in recent affective computing studies. (3) With the goal to reduce the variance of correlations estimated by an automatic detector, we show that training multiple neural networks d(1) , . . . , d(m) using different training architectures and hyperparameters for the same detection task provides only limited “coverage” of T^n. 

   more » « less