This paper proposes a novel k-medoids approximation algorithm to handle large-scale datasets with reasonable computational time and memory complexity. We develop a local-search algorithm that iteratively improves the medoid selection based on the estimation of the k-medoids objective. A single batch of size m

Multiple two-sample test problem in a graph-structured setting is a common scenario in fields such as Spatial Statistics and Neuroscience. Each node $v$ in fixed graph deals with a two-sample testing problem between two node-specific probability density functions, $p_v$ and $q_v$. The goal is to identify nodes where the null hypothesis $p_v = q_v$ should be rejected, under the assumption that connected nodes would yield similar test outcomes. We propose the non-parametric collaborative two-sample testing (CTST) framework that efficiently leverages the graph structure and minimizes the assumptions over $p_v$ and $q_v$. CTST integrates elements from f-divergence estimation, Kernel Methods, and Multitask Learning. We use synthetic experiments and a real sensor network detecting seismic activity to demonstrate that CTST outperforms state-of-the-art non-parametric statistical tests that apply at each node independently, hence disregard the geometry of the problem.

In this paper, we present a deterministic particle-based method for global optimization of continuous Sobolev functions, called \emph{Stein Boltzmann Sampling} (SBS). SBS initializes uniformly a number of particles representing candidate solutions, then uses the \emph{Stein Variational Gradient Descent} (SVGD) algorithm to sequentially and deterministically move those particles in order to approximate a target distribution whose mass is concentrated around promising areas of the domain of the optimized function. The target is chosen to be a properly parametrized Boltzmann distribution. For the purpose of global optimization, we adapt the generic SVGD theoretical framework allowing to address more general target distributions over a compact subset of $\mathbb{R}^d$, and we prove SBS’s asymptotic convergence. In addition to the main SBS algorithm, we present two variants: the SBS-PF that includes a particle filtering strategy, and the SBS-HYBRID one that uses SBS or SBS-PF as a continuation after other particle- or distribution-based optimization methods. A detailed comparison with state-of-the-art methods on benchmark functions demonstrates that SBS and its variants are highly competitive, while the combination of the two variants provides the best trade-off between accuracy and computational cost.

This paper introduces the Collaborative Likelihood-ratio Estimation problem, which is relevant for applications involving multiple statistical estimation tasks that can be mapped to the nodes of a fixed graph expressing pairwise task similarity. Each graph node $v$ observes i.i.d data from two unknown node-specific pdfs, $p_{v}$ and $q_{v}$, and the goal is to estimate the likelihood-ratios (or density-ratios), $r_{v}(x)=\frac{q_{v}(x)}{p_{v}(x)}$, for all $v$. Our contribution is multifold: we present a non-parametric collaborative framework that leverages the graph structure of the problem to solve the tasks more efficiently; we present a concrete method that we call Graph-based Relative Unconstrained Least-Squares Importance Fitting (GRULSIF) along with an efficient implementation; we derive convergence rates that highlight the role of the main variables of the problem. Our theoretical results explicit the conditions under which the collaborative estimation leads to performance gains compared to solving each estimation task independently. Finally, in a series of experiments, we demonstrate that the joint likelihood-ratio estimation of GRULSIF at all graph nodes is more accurate compared to state-of-the-art methods that operate independently at each node, and we verify that the behavior of GRULSIF is in agreement with our theoretical analysis.

This paper deals with uncertainty quantification and out-of-distribution detection in deep learning using Bayesian and ensemble methods. It proposes a practical solution to the lack of prediction diversity observed recently for standard approaches when used out-of-distribution (Ovadia et al., 2019; Liu et al., 2021). Considering that this issue is mainly related to a lack of weight diversity, we claim that standard methods sample in "over-restricted" regions of the weight space due to the use of "over-regularization" processes, such as weight decay and zero-mean centered Gaussian priors. We propose to solve the problem by adopting the maximum entropy principle for the weight distribution, with the underlying idea to maximize the weight diversity. Under this paradigm, the epistemic uncertainty is described by the weight distribution of maximal entropy that produces neural networks "consistent" with the training observations. Considering stochastic neural networks, a practical optimization is derived to build such a distribution, defined as a trade-off between the average empirical risk and the weight distribution entropy. We provide both theoretical and numerical results to assess the efficiency of the approach. In particular, the proposed algorithm appears in the top three best methods in all configurations of an extensive out-of-distribution detection benchmark including more than thirty competitors.

Quantifying the difference between two probability density functions, $p$ and $q$, using available data, is a fundamental problem in Statistics and Machine Learning. A usual approach for addressing this problem is the likelihood-ratio estimation (LRE) between $p$ and $q$, which -to our best knowledge- has been investigated mainly for the offline case. This paper contributes by introducing a new framework for online non-parametric LRE (OLRE) for the setting where pairs of iid observations $(x_t \sim p, x’_t \sim q)$ are observed over time. The non-parametric nature of our approach has the advantage of being agnostic to the forms of $p$ and $q$. Moreover, we capitalize on the recent advances in Kernel Methods and functional minimization to develop an estimator that can be efficiently updated at every iteration. We provide theoretical guarantees for the performance of the OLRE method along with empirical validation in synthetic experiments.

The standard paired-sample testing approach in the multidimensional setting applies multiple univariate tests on the individual features, followed by $p -$value adjustments. Such an approach suffers when the data carry numerous features. A number of studies have shown that classification accuracy can be seen as a proxy for two-sample testing. However, neither theoretical foundations nor practical recipes have been proposed so far on how this strategy could be extended to multidimensional paired-sample testing. In this work, we put forward the idea that scoring functions can be produced by the decision rules defined by the perpendicular bisecting hyperplanes of the line segments connecting each pair of instances. Then, the optimal scoring function can be obtained by the pseudomedian of those rules, which we estimate by extending naturally the Hodges-Lehmann estimator. We accordingly propose a framework of a two-step testing procedure. First, we estimate the bisecting hyperplanes for each pair of instances and an aggregated rule derived through the Hodges-Lehmann estimator. The paired samples are scored by this aggregated rule to produce a unidimensional representation. Second, we perform a Wilcoxon signed-rank test on the obtained representation. Our experiments indicate that our approach has substantial performance gains in testing accuracy compared to the traditional multivariate and multiple testing, while at the same time estimates each feature’s contribution to the final result.

We consider the problem of collaborative learning with non-identical inter-node distributions and unbalanced training sample sizes. This problem arises in many real-world machine-learning scenarios and is particularly difficult to address due to the specificity of data architecture. Moreover, global models produced by traditional collaborative learning approaches, as federated learning methods, often fail to provide accurate models for each node due to distribution shifts. In this work, we propose to address this problem through a personalized collaborative algorithm returning a weighted average of the other nodes’ models to each node. The personalization consists in deriving a local weighting based on the optimization of an estimate of the weighted average model risk. We provide a theoretical framework of the approach by showing that the proposed optimization leads to a water-filling optimization where the optimal weighting solves a trade-off between integrating nearby nodes and minimizing the local variance. We derive theoretical insights based on the role of local bias and local variance of each model. We test our algorithm on five datasets, including four real-world ones, and show significant improvements in terms of individual node accuracy.

In this article, we introduce a novel lower bound on the support size of lowband graph signals. This result allows the deduction of an optimality criterion for the lowband and sparse decomposition of any graph signal, establishing the uniqueness of well behaving solutions. A comparison of the new bound with previously introduced results is performed, showing the improvements brought by the present work. An illustration on a practical denoising usecase on a real graph is also provided.

This paper addresses the problem of segmenting a stream of graph signals: we aim to detect changes in the mean of the multivariate signal defined over the nodes of a known graph. We propose an offline algorithm that relies on the concept of graph signal stationarity and allows the convenient translation of the problem from the original vertex domain to the spectral domain (Graph Fourier Transform), where it is much easier to solve. Although the obtained spectral representation is sparse in real applications, to the best of our knowledge this property has not been much exploited in the existing related literature. Our main contribution is a change-point detection algorithm that adopts a model selection perspective, which takes into account the sparsity of the spectral representation and determines automatically the number of change-points. Our detector comes with a proof of a non-asymptotic oracle inequality, numerical experiments demonstrate the validity of our method.

We present a novel instance-based approach to handle regression tasks in the context of supervised domain adaptation under an assumption of covariate shift. The approach developed in this paper is based on the assumption that the task on the target domain can be efficiently learned by adequately reweighting the source instances during training phase. We introduce a novel formulation of the optimization objective for domain adaptation which relies on a discrepancy distance characterizing the difference between domains according to a specific task and a class of hypotheses. To solve this problem, we develop an adversarial network algorithm which learns both the source weighting scheme and the task in one feed-forward gradient descent. We provide numerical evidence of the relevance of the method on public data sets for regression domain adaptation through reproducible experiments.

In this paper, we consider the problem of learning a graph structure from multivariate signals, known as graph signals. Such signals are multivariate observations carrying measurements corresponding to the nodes of an unknown graph, which we desire to infer. They are assumed to enjoy a sparse representation in the graph spectral domain, a feature which is known to carry information related to the cluster structure of a graph. The signals are also assumed to behave smoothly with respect to the underlying graph structure. For the graph learning problem, we propose a new optimization program to learn the Laplacian of this graph and provide two algorithms to solve it, called IGL-3SR and FGL-3SR. Based on a 3-step alternating procedure, both algorithms rely on standard minimization methods --such as manifold gradient descent or linear programming-- and have lower complexity compared to state-of-the-art algorithms. While IGL-3SR ensures convergence, FGL-3SR acts as a relaxation and is significantly faster since its alternating process relies on multiple closed-form solutions. Both algorithms are evaluated on synthetic and real data. They are shown to perform as good or better than their competitors in terms of both numerical performance and scalability. Finally, we present a probabilistic interpretation of the proposed optimization program as a Factor Analysis Model.

In this article, we propose to extend the classical Convolutional Sparse Coding model (CSC) to multivariate data by introducing a new tensor CSC model that enforces sparsity and low-rank constraint on the activations. The advantages of this model are threefold. First, by using tensor algebra, this model takes into account the underlying structure of the data. Second, this model allows for complex atoms but enforces fewer activations to decompose the data, resulting in an improved summary (dictionary) and a better reconstruction of the original multivariate signal. Third, the number of parameters to be estimated are greatly reduced by the low-rank constraint. We exhibit the associated optimization problem and propose a framework based on alternating optimization to solve it. Finally, we evaluate it on both synthetic and real data.

This work focuses on the estimation of multiple change-points in a time-varying Ising model that evolves piece-wise constantly. The aim is to identify both the moments at which significant changes occur in the Ising model, as well as the underlying graph structures. For this purpose, we propose to estimate the neighborhood of each node by maximizing a penalized version of its conditional log-likelihood. The objective of the penalization is twofold: it imposes sparsity in the learned graphs and, thanks to a fused-type penalty, it also enforces them to evolve piece-wise constantly. Using few assumptions, we provide two change-points consistency theorems. Those are the first in the context of unknown number of change-points detection in time-varying Ising model. Finally, experimental results on several synthetic datasets and a real-world dataset demonstrate the performance of our method.

In this article, we propose an automatic procedure to calibrate change point detection algorithms. Our approach expands on the ability of an expert to provide very rough segmentation estimates, called partial annotations, for a few signal examples. Our contribution consists in a supervised strategy to learn a kernel Mahalanobis metric, which, once combined with a detection algorithm, can replicate the expert's segmentation strategy on new signals. Contrary to previous works, our approach is non-parametric, supervised and naturally accommodates partial annotations. Experiments on real-world data show that supervision significantly improves detection performance.

In this paper we present the Warm-starting Dynamic Thresholding algorithm, developed using dynamic programming, for a variant of the standard online selection problem. The problem allows job positions to be either free or already occupied at the beginning of the process. Throughout the selection process, the decision maker interviews one after the other the new candidates and reveals a quality score for each of them. Based on that information, she can (re) assign each job at most once by taking immediate and irrevocable decisions. We relax the hard requirement of the class of dynamic programming algorithms to perfectly know the distribution from which the scores of candidates are drawn, by presenting extensions for the partial and no-information cases, in which the decision maker can learn the underlying score distribution sequentially while interviewing candidates.

In this paper, we introduce DICOD, a convolutional sparse coding algorithm which builds shift invariant representations for long signals. This algorithm is designed to run in a distributed setting, with local message passing, making it communication efficient. It is based on coordinate descent and uses locally greedy updates which accelerate the resolution compared to greedy coordinate selection. We prove the convergence of this algorithm and highlight its computational speed-up which is super-linear in the number of cores used. We also provide empirical evidence for the acceleration properties of our algorithm compared to state-of-the-art methods.

The goal of the paper is to design sequential strategies which lead to efficient optimization of an unknown function under the only assumption that it has a finite Lipschitz constant. We first identify sufficient conditions for the consistency of generic sequential algorithms and formulate the expected minimax rate for their performance. We introduce and analyze a first algorithm called LIPO which assumes the Lipschitz constant to be known. Consistency, minimax rates for LIPO are proved, as well as fast rates under an additional Hölder like condition. An adaptive version of LIPO is also introduced for the more realistic setup where Lipschitz constant is unknown and has to be estimated along with the optimization. Similar theoretical guarantees are shown to hold for the adaptive LIPO algorithm and a numerical assessment is provided at the end of the paper to illustrate the potential of this strategy with respect to state-of-the-art methods over typical benchmark problems for global optimization.

We consider the problem of maximizing an unknown function f over a compact and convex set using as few observations f(x) as possible. We observe that the optimization of the function f essentially relies on learning the induced bipartite ranking rule of f. Based on this idea, we relate global optimization to bipartite ranking which allows to address problems with high dimensional input space, as well as cases of functions with weak regularity properties. The paper introduces novel meta-algorithms for global optimization which rely on the choice of any bipartite ranking method. Theoretical properties are provided as well as convergence guarantees and equivalences between various optimization methods are obtained as a by-product. Eventually, numerical evidence is given to show that the main algorithm of the paper which adapts empirically to the underlying ranking structure essentially outperforms existing state-of-the-art global optimization algorithms in typical benchmarks.

This paper investigates the control of a diffusion process by utilizing real-time information. More specifically, we allow the network administrator to adjust the allocation of control resources, a set of treatments that increase the recovery rate of infected nodes, according to the evolution of the diffusion process. We first present a novel framework for describing a large class of dynamic control strategies. These strategies rely on sorting the nodes according to a priority score in order to treat more sensitive regions first. Then, we propose the Largest Reduction in Infectious Edges (LRIE) control strategy which is based on a greedy minimization of the cost associated to the undesired diffusion, and has the benefits of being efficient and easy to implement. Our simulations, which were conducted using a software package that we developed and made available to the community, show that the LRIE strategy substantially outperforms its competitors in a wide range of scenarios.

The paper studies transition phenomena in information cascades observed along a diffusion process over some graph. We introduce the Laplace Hazard matrix and show that its spectral radius fully characterizes the dynamics of the contagion both in terms of influence and of explosion time. Using this concept, we prove tight non-asymptotic bounds for the influence of a set of nodes, and we also provide an in-depth analysis of the critical time after which the contagion becomes super-critical. Our contributions include formal definitions and tight lower bounds of critical explosion time. We illustrate the relevance of our theoretical results through several examples of information cascades used in epidemiology and viral marketing models. Finally, we provide a series of numerical experiments for various types of networks which confirm the tightness of the theoretical bounds.

In this paper, we analyze a generic algorithm scheme for sequential global optimization using Gaussian processes. The upper bounds we derive on the cumulative regret for this generic algorithm improve by an exponential factor the previously known bounds for algorithms like GP-UCB. We also introduce the novel Gaussian Process Mutual Information algorithm (GP-MI), which significantly improves further these upper bounds for the cumulative regret. We confirm the efficiency of this algorithm on synthetic and real tasks against the natural competitor, GP-UCB, and also the Expected Improvement heuristic.

In the paper, we consider the problem of link prediction in time-evolving graphs. We assume that certain graph features, such as the node degree, follow a vector autoregressive (VAR) model and we propose to use this information to improve the accuracy of prediction. Our strategy involves a joint optimization procedure over the space of adjacency matrices and VAR matrices which takes into account both sparsity and low rank properties of the matrices. Oracle inequalities are derived and illustrate the trade-offs in the choice of smoothing parameters when modeling the joint effect of sparsity and low rank property. The estimate is computed efficiently using proximal methods through a generalized forward-backward agorithm.

We consider the problem of discovering links of an evolving undirected graph given a series of past snapshots of that graph. The graph is observed through the time sequence of its adjacency matrix and only the presence of edges is observed. The absence of an edge on a certain snapshot cannot be distinguished from a missing entry in the adjacency matrix. Additional information can be provided by examining the dynamics of the graph through a set of topological features, such as the degrees of the vertices. We develop a novel methodology by building on both static matrix completion methods and the estimation of the future state of relevant graph features. Our procedure relies on the formulation of an optimization problem which can be approximately solved by a fast alternating linearized algorithm whose properties are examined. We show experiments with both simulated and real data which reveal the interest of our methodology.

The Precision-Recall (PR) curve is a widely used visual tool to evaluate the performance of scoring functions in regards to their capacities to discriminate between two populations. The purpose of this paper is to examine both theoretical and practical issues related to the statistical estimation of PR curves based on classification data. Consistency and asymptotic normality of the empirical counterpart of the PR curve in sup norm are rigorously established. Eventually, the issue of building confidence bands in the PR space is considered and a specific resampling procedure based on a smoothed and truncated version of the empirical distribution of the data is promoted. Arguments of theoretical and computational nature are presented to explain why such a bootstrap is preferable to a "naive" bootstrap in this setup.

It has recently been shown how to extend successfully decision tree induction algorithms to bipartite ranking [1]. The major drawbacks of tree-based prediction rules, instability and lack of smoothness namely, are however exacerbated by the global nature of the ranking problem. It is the purpose of this paper to show how to adapt the “bagging” approach, originally introduced in the classification/regression context [2], in order to improve the performance of tree-based ranking rules with regard to these disadvantages. Whereas the notion of majority voting scheme applies to a local prediction problem such as classification or regression in a natural fashion, it is much less straightforward to determine how to average the orderings predicted by many ranking trees. Here we propose various strategies for bagging tree ranking rules inspired by recent advances in the field of rank aggregation for the Web. Strong empirical evidence supporting the fact that they may drastically reduce the variability of unstable statistical procedures such as the TREERANK method is also provided through a simulation study.

The purpose of the paper is to explore the connection between multivariate homogeneity tests and $\auc$ optimization. The latter problem has recently received much attention in the statistical learning literature. From the elementary observation that, in the two-sample problem setup, the null assumption corresponds to the situation where the area under the optimal ROC curve is equal to 1/2, we propose a two-stage testing method based on data splitting. A nearly optimal scoring function in the AUC sense is first learnt from one of the two half-samples. Data from the remaining half-sample are then projected onto the real line and eventually ranked according to the scoring function computed at the first stage. The last step amounts to performing a standard Mann-Whitney Wilcoxon test in the one-dimensional framework. We show that the learning step of the procedure does not affect the consistency of the test as well as its properties in terms of power, provided the ranking produced is accurate enough in the AUC sense. The results of a numerical experiment are eventually displayed in order to show the efficiency of the method.

This paper investigates how recursive partitioning methods can be adapted to the bipartite ranking problem. In ranking, the pursued goal is global: based on past data, define an order on the whole input space X, so that positive instances take up the top ranks with maximum probability. The most natural way to order all instances consists of projecting the input data onto the real line through a real-valued scoring function s and use the natural order on R. The accuracy of the ordering induced by a candidatesis classically measured in terms of the ROC curve or the AUC. Here we discuss the design of tree-structured scoring functions obtained by recursively maximizing the AUC criterion. The connection with recursive piecewise linear approximation of the optimal ROC curve both in the L1-sense and in the Linfin-sense is highlighted. A novel tree-based algorithm for ranking, called TreeRank, is proposed. Consistency results and generalization bounds of functional nature are established for this ranking method, when considering either the L1or Linfindistance. We also describe committee-based learning procedures using TreeRank as a ldquobase ranker,rdquo in order to overcome obvious drawbacks of such a top-down partitioning technique. Simulation results on artificial data are also displayed.

This paper is devoted to thoroughly investigating how to bootstrap the ROC curve, a widely used visual tool for evaluating the accuracy of test/scoring statistics in the bipartite setup. The issue of confidence bands for the ROC curve is considered and a resampling procedure based on a smooth version of the empirical distribution called the smoothed bootstrap" is introduced. Theoretical arguments and simulation results are presented to show that the "smoothed bootstrap" is preferable to a "naive" bootstrap in order to construct accurate confidence bands."

The ROC curve is known to be the golden standard for measuring performance of a test/scoring statistic regarding its capacity of discrimination between two populations in a wide variety of applications, ranging from anomaly detection in signal processing to information retrieval, through medical diagnosis. Most practical performance measures used in scoring applications such as the AUC, the local AUC, the p-norm push, the DCG and others, can be seen as summaries of the ROC curve. This paper highlights the fact that many of these empirical criteria can be expressed as (conditional) linear rank statistics. We investigate the properties of empirical maximizers of such performance criteria and provide preliminary results for the concentration properties of a novel class of random variables that we will call a linear rank process.

ROC curves are one of the most widely used displays to evaluate performance of scoring functions. In the paper, we propose a statistical method for directly optimizing the ROC curve. The target is known to be the regression function up to an increasing transformation and this boils down to recovering the level sets of the latter. We propose to use classifiers obtained by empirical risk minimization of a weighted classification error and then to construct a scoring rule by overlaying these classifiers. We show the consistency and rate of convergence to the optimal ROC curve of this procedure in terms of supremum norm and also, as a byproduct of the analysis, we derive an empirical estimate of the optimal ROC curve.

We consider the problem of constructing an aggregated estimator from a finite class of base functions which approximately minimizes a con- vex risk functional under the ℓ1 constraint. For this purpose, we propose a stochastic procedure, the mirror descent, which performs gradient de- scent in the dual space. The generated estimates are additionally aver- aged in a recursive fashion with specific weights. Mirror descent algo- rithms have been developed in different contexts and they are known to be particularly efficient in high dimensional problems. Moreover their implementation is adapted to the online setting. The main result of the paper is the upper bound on the convergence rate for the generalization error.