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  1. Free, publicly-accessible full text available October 1, 2024
  2. We consider a symmetric mixture of linear regressions with random samples from the pairwise comparison design, which can be seen as a noisy version of a type of Euclidean distance geometry problem. We analyze the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm locally around the ground truth and establish that the sequence converges linearly, providing an $\ell_\infty$-norm guarantee on the estimation error of the iterates. Furthermore, we show that the limit of the EM sequence achieves the sharp rate of estimation in the $\ell_2$-norm, matching the information-theoretically optimal constant. We also argue through simulation that convergence from a random initialization is much more delicate in this setting, and does not appear to occur in general. Our results show that the EM algorithm can exhibit several unique behaviors when the covariate distribution is suitably structured. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available July 1, 2024
  3. Free, publicly-accessible full text available June 23, 2024
  4. Free, publicly-accessible full text available June 2, 2024
  5. Belkin, Mikhail ; Kpotufe, Samory (Ed.)
    Graph matching, also known as network alignment, refers to finding a bijection between the vertex sets of two given graphs so as to maximally align their edges. This fundamental computational problem arises frequently in multiple fields such as computer vision and biology. Recently, there has been a plethora of work studying efficient algorithms for graph matching under probabilistic models. In this work, we propose a new algorithm for graph matching: Our algorithm associates each vertex with a signature vector using a multistage procedure and then matches a pair of vertices from the two graphs if their signature vectors are close to each other. We show that, for two Erdős–Rényi graphs with edge correlation $1-\alpha$, our algorithm recovers the underlying matching exactly with high probability when $\alpha \le 1 / (\log \log n)^C$, where $n$ is the number of vertices in each graph and $C$ denotes a positive universal constant. This improves the condition $\alpha \le 1 / (\log n)^C$ achieved in previous work. 
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  6. Belkin, Mikhail ; Samory Kpotufe (Ed.)
    Graph matching, also known as network alignment, refers to finding a bijection between the vertex sets of two given graphs so as to maximally align their edges. This fundamental computational problem arises frequently in multiple fields such as computer vision and biology. Recently, there has been a plethora of work studying efficient algorithms for graph matching under probabilistic models. In this work, we propose a new algorithm for graph matching: Our algorithm associates each vertex with a signature vector using a multistage procedure and then matches a pair of vertices from the two graphs if their signature vectors are close to each other. We show that, for two Erdős–Rényi graphs with edge correlation 1−α, our algorithm recovers the underlying matching exactly with high probability when α≤1/(loglogn)C, where n is the number of vertices in each graph and C denotes a positive universal constant. This improves the condition α≤1/(logn)C achieved in previous work. 
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