9 accepted papers
We study the statistical properties of the iterates generated by gradient descent, applied to the fundamental problem of least squares regression. We take a continuous-time view, i.e., consider infinitesimal step sizes in gradient descent, in which case the iterates form a trajectory called gradient…
We present an extension of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) two-sample test, which can be more sensitive to differences in the tails. Our test statistic is an integral probability metric (IPM) defined over a higher-order total variation ball, recovering the original KS test as its simplest case. We giv…
We extend conformal prediction methodology beyond the case of exchangeable data. In particular, we show that a weighted version of conformal prediction can be used to compute distribution-free prediction intervals for problems in which the test and training covariate distributions differ, but the li…
The Kalman filter (KF) is one of the most widely used tools for data assimilation and sequential estimation. In this work, we show that the state estimates from the KF in a standard linear dynamical system setting are equivalent to those given by the KF in a transformed system, with infinite process…
In the 1-dimensional multiple changepoint detection problem, we derive a new fast error rate for the fused lasso estimator, under the assumption that the mean vector has a sparse number of changepoints. This rate is seen to be suboptimal (compared to the minimax rate) by only a factor of $\log\log{n…
We study connections between Dykstra's algorithm for projecting onto an intersection of convex sets, the augmented Lagrangian method of multipliers or ADMM, and block coordinate descent. We prove that coordinate descent for a regularized regression problem, in which the penalty is a separable sum of…
We consider the problem of estimating the values of a function over $n$ nodes of a $d$-dimensional grid graph (having equal side lengths $n^{1/d}$) from noisy observations. The function is assumed to be smooth, but is allowed to exhibit different amounts of smoothness at different regions in the gri…
We introduce the Multiple Quantile Graphical Model (MQGM), which extends the neighborhood selection approach of Meinshausen and Buhlmann for learning sparse graphical models. The latter is defined by the basic subproblem of modeling the conditional mean of one variable as a sparse function of all o…
We consider the problem of estimating a function defined over $n$ locations on a $d$-dimensional grid (having all side lengths equal to $n^{1/d}$). When the function is constrained to have discrete total variation bounded by $C_n$, we derive the minimax optimal (squared) $\ell_2$ estimation error r…