Towards Machine Wald

The past century has seen a steady increase in the need of estimating and predicting complex systems and making (possibly critical) decisions with limited information. Although computers have made possible the numerical evaluation of sophisticated statistical models, these models are still designed \emph{by humans} because there is currently no known recipe or algorithm for dividing the design of a statistical model into a sequence of arithmetic operations. Indeed enabling computers to \emph{think} as \emph{humans} have the ability to do when faced with uncertainty is challenging in several major ways: (1) Finding optimal statistical models remains to be formulated as a well posed problem when information on the system of interest is incomplete and comes in the form of a complex combination of sample data, partial knowledge of constitutive relations and a limited description of the distribution of input random variables. (2) The space of admissible scenarios along with the space of relevant information, assumptions, and/or beliefs, tend to be infinite dimensional, whereas calculus on a computer is necessarily discrete and finite. With this purpose, this paper explores the foundations of a rigorous framework for the scientific computation of optimal statistical estimators/models and reviews their connections with Decision Theory, Machine Learning, Bayesian Inference, Stochastic Optimization, Robust Optimization, Optimal Uncertainty Quantification and Information Based Complexity.Comment: 37 page

Self-adaptation of mutation distribution in evolutionary algorithms

This paper is posted here with permission from IEEE - Copyright @ 2007 IEEEThis paper proposes a self-adaptation method to control not only the mutation strength parameter, but also the mutation distribution for evolutionary algorithms. For this purpose, the isotropic g-Gaussian distribution is employed in the mutation operator. The g-Gaussian distribution allows to control the shape of the distribution by setting a real parameter g and can reproduce either finite second moment distributions or infinite second moment distributions. In the proposed method, the real parameter q of the g-Gaussian distribution is encoded in the chromosome of an individual and is allowed to evolve. An evolutionary programming algorithm with the proposed idea is presented. Experiments were carried out to study the performance of the proposed algorithm

Stochastic Block Coordinate Frank-Wolfe Algorithm for Large-Scale Biological Network Alignment

With increasingly "big" data available in biomedical research, deriving accurate and reproducible biology knowledge from such big data imposes enormous computational challenges. In this paper, motivated by recently developed stochastic block coordinate algorithms, we propose a highly scalable randomized block coordinate Frank-Wolfe algorithm for convex optimization with general compact convex constraints, which has diverse applications in analyzing biomedical data for better understanding cellular and disease mechanisms. We focus on implementing the derived stochastic block coordinate algorithm to align protein-protein interaction networks for identifying conserved functional pathways based on the IsoRank framework. Our derived stochastic block coordinate Frank-Wolfe (SBCFW) algorithm has the convergence guarantee and naturally leads to the decreased computational cost (time and space) for each iteration. Our experiments for querying conserved functional protein complexes in yeast networks confirm the effectiveness of this technique for analyzing large-scale biological networks

Motion Planning of Uncertain Ordinary Differential Equation Systems

This work presents a novel motion planning framework, rooted in nonlinear programming theory, that treats uncertain fully and under-actuated dynamical systems described by ordinary differential equations. Uncertainty in multibody dynamical systems comes from various sources, such as: system parameters, initial conditions, sensor and actuator noise, and external forcing. Treatment of uncertainty in design is of paramount practical importance because all real-life systems are affected by it, and poor robustness and suboptimal performance result if it’s not accounted for in a given design. In this work uncertainties are modeled using Generalized Polynomial Chaos and are solved quantitatively using a least-square collocation method. The computational efficiency of this approach enables the inclusion of uncertainty statistics in the nonlinear programming optimization process. As such, the proposed framework allows the user to pose, and answer, new design questions related to uncertain dynamical systems. Specifically, the new framework is explained in the context of forward, inverse, and hybrid dynamics formulations. The forward dynamics formulation, applicable to both fully and under-actuated systems, prescribes deterministic actuator inputs which yield uncertain state trajectories. The inverse dynamics formulation is the dual to the forward dynamic, and is only applicable to fully-actuated systems; deterministic state trajectories are prescribed and yield uncertain actuator inputs. The inverse dynamics formulation is more computationally efficient as it requires only algebraic evaluations and completely avoids numerical integration. Finally, the hybrid dynamics formulation is applicable to under-actuated systems where it leverages the benefits of inverse dynamics for actuated joints and forward dynamics for unactuated joints; it prescribes actuated state and unactuated input trajectories which yield uncertain unactuated states and actuated inputs. The benefits of the ability to quantify uncertainty when planning the motion of multibody dynamic systems are illustrated through several case-studies. The resulting designs determine optimal motion plans—subject to deterministic and statistical constraints—for all possible systems within the probability space

Price decomposition in large-scale stochastic optimal control

We are interested in optimally driving a dynamical system that can be influenced by exogenous noises. This is generally called a Stochastic Optimal Control (SOC) problem and the Dynamic Programming (DP) principle is the natural way of solving it. Unfortunately, DP faces the so-called curse of dimensionality: the complexity of solving DP equations grows exponentially with the dimension of the information variable that is sufficient to take optimal decisions (the state variable). For a large class of SOC problems, which includes important practical problems, we propose an original way of obtaining strategies to drive the system. The algorithm we introduce is based on Lagrangian relaxation, of which the application to decomposition is well-known in the deterministic framework. However, its application to such closed-loop problems is not straightforward and an additional statistical approximation concerning the dual process is needed. We give a convergence proof, that derives directly from classical results concerning duality in optimization, and enlghten the error made by our approximation. Numerical results are also provided, on a large-scale SOC problem. This idea extends the original DADP algorithm that was presented by Barty, Carpentier and Girardeau (2010)