Abstract: Chao Gao will discuss the problem of statistical estimation with contaminated data. In the first part of the talk, I will discuss depth-based approaches that achieve minimax rates in various problems. In general, the minimax rate of a given problem with contamination consists of two terms: the statistical complexity without contamination, and the contamination effect in the form of modulus of continuity. In the second part of the talk, I will discuss computational challenges of these depth-based estimators. An…

Logistic regression is a fundamental task in machine learning and statistics. For the simple case of linear models, Hazan et al. (2014) showed that any logistic regression algorithm that estimates model weights from samples must exhibit exponential dependence on the weight magnitude. As an alternative, we explore a counterintuitive technique called improper learning, whereby one estimates a linear model by fitting a non-linear model. Past success stories for improper learning have focused on cases where it can improve computational complexity.…

Abstract: This talk will present a class of exponential bounds for the probability that a martingale sequence crosses a time-dependent linear threshold. Our key insight is that it is both natural and fruitful to formulate exponential concentration inequalities in this way. We will illustrate this point by presenting a single assumption and a single theorem that together strengthen many tail bounds for martingales, including classical inequalities (1960-80) by Bernstein, Bennett, Hoeffding, and Freedman; contemporary inequalities (1980-2000) by Shorack and Wellner,…

Abstract: The talk will focus on optimization on the high-dimensional sphere when the objective function is a linear combination of homogeneous polynomials with standard Gaussian coefficients. Such random processes are called spherical spin glasses in physics, and have been extensively studied since the 80s. I will describe certain geometric properties of spherical spin glasses unique to the full-RSB case, and explain how they can be used to design a polynomial time algorithm that finds points within small multiplicative error from…

Abstract: In this work we consider bootstrap-based inference methods for functions of the parameter vector in the presence of many moment inequalities where the number of moment inequalities, denoted by p, is possibly much larger than the sample size n. In particular this covers the case of subvector inference, such as the inference on a single component associated with a treatment/policy variable of interest. We consider a min-max of (centered and non-centered) Studentized statistics and study the properties of the…

Abstract: Total variation denoising (TVD) is a popular technique for nonparametric function estimation. I will first present a theoretical optimality result for univariate TVD for estimating piecewise constant functions. I will then present related results for various extensions of univariate TVD including adaptive risk bounds for higher-order TVD (also known as trend filtering) as well as a multivariate extension via the Hardy-Krause Variation which avoids the curse of dimensionality to some extent. I will also mention connections to shape restricted…

Abstract: Over 500K scientific articles have been published since 1999 with the word “network” in the title. And the vast majority of these report network summary statistics of one type or another. However, these numbers are rarely accompanied by any quantification of uncertainty. Yet any error inherent in the measurements underlying the construction of the network, or in the network construction procedure itself, necessarily must propagate to any summary statistics reported. Perhaps surprisingly, there is little in the way of…