13 accepted papers
Typical models of active learning assume a learner can directly manipulate or query a covariate X to study its relationship with a response Y. However, if X is a feature of a complex system, it may be possible only to indirectly influence X by manipulating a control variable Z, a scenario we refer t…
To avoid failures on out-of-distribution data, recent works have sought to extract features that have an invariant or stable relationship with the label across domains, discarding "spurious" or unstable features whose relationship with the label changes across domains. However, unstable features oft…
The vast majority of statistical theory on binary classification characterizes performance in terms of accuracy. However, accuracy is known in many cases to poorly reflect the practical consequences of classification error, most famously in imbalanced binary classification, where data are dominated…
Domain generalization (DG) seeks predictors which perform well on unseen test distributions by leveraging data drawn from multiple related training distributions or domains. To achieve this, DG is commonly formulated as an average- or worst-case problem over the set of possible domains. However, pre…
The continuum-armed bandits problem involves optimizing an unknown objective function given an oracle that evaluates the function at a query point. In the most well-studied case, the objective function is assumed to be Lipschitz continuous and minimax rates of simple and cumulative regrets are known…
We propose a novel approach that integrates machine learning into compartmental disease modeling (e.g., SEIR) to predict the progression of COVID-19. Our model is explainable by design as it explicitly shows how different compartments evolve and it uses interpretable encoders to incorporate covariat…
We study minimax convergence rates of nonparametric density estimation under the Huber contamination model, in which a ``contaminated'' proportion of the data comes from an unknown outlier distribution. We provide the first results for this problem under a large family of losses, called Besov integr…
We study the problem of estimating a nonparametric probability distribution under a family of losses called Besov IPMs. This family is quite large, including, for example, L^p distances, total variation distance, and generalizations of both Wasserstein (earthmover's) and Kolmogorov-Smirnov distances…
Sparse dictionary learning (SDL) has become a popular method for learning parsimonious representations of data, a fundamental problem in machine learning and signal processing. While most work on SDL assumes a training dataset of independent and identically distributed (IID) samples, a variant known…
We study minimax convergence rates of nonparametric density estimation under a large class of loss functions called ``adversarial losses'', which, besides classical L^p losses, includes maximum mean discrepancy (MMD), Wasserstein distance, and total variation distance. These losses are closely relat…
We study the problem of using i.i.d. samples from an unknown multivariate probability distribution p to estimate the mutual information of p. This problem has recently received attention in two settings: (1) where p is assumed to be Gaussian and (2) where p is assumed only to lie in a large nonparam…
Sobolev quantities (norms, inner products, and distances) of probability density functions are important in the theory of nonparametric statistics, but have rarely been used in practice, partly due to a lack of practical estimators. They also include, as special cases, L^2 quantities which are used…
We provide finite-sample analysis of a general framework for using k-nearest neighbor statistics to estimate functionals of a nonparametric continuous probability density, including entropies and divergences. Rather than plugging a consistent density estimate (which requires k → ∞ as the sample size…