Joint mixability of some integer matrices

We study the problem of permuting each column of a given matrix to achieve minimum maximal row sum or maximum minimal row sum, a problem of interest in probability theory and quantitative finance where quantiles of a random variable expressed as the sum of several random variables with unknown dependence structure are estimated. If the minimum maximal row sum is equal to the maximum minimal row sum the matrix has been termed jointly mixable (see e.g. Haus (2015), Wang and Wang (2015), Wang et al. (2013)). We show that the lack of joint mixability (the joint mixability gap) is not significant, i.e., the gap between the minimum maximal row sum and the maximum minimal row sum is either zero or one for a class of integer matrices including binary and complete consecutive integers matrices. For integer matrices where all entries are drawn from a given set of discrete values, we show that the gap can be as large as the difference between the maximal and minimal elements of the discrete set. The aforementioned result also leads to a polynomial-time approximation algorithm for matrices with restricted domain. Computing the gap for a {0,1,2}-matrix is proved to be equivalent to finding column permutations minimizing the difference between the maximum and minimum row sums. A polynomial procedure for computing the optimum difference by solving the maximum flow problem on an appropriate graph is given. © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Joint Mixability of Elliptical Distributions and Related Families

In this paper, we further develop the theory of complete mixability and joint mixability for some distribution families. We generalize a result of R\"uschendorf and Uckelmann (2002) related to complete mixability of continuous distribution function having a symmetric and unimodal density. Two different proofs to a result of Wang and Wang (2016) which related to the joint mixability of elliptical distributions with the same characteristic generator are present. We solve the Open Problem 7 in Wang (2015) by constructing a bimodal-symmetric distribution. The joint mixability of slash-elliptical distributions and skew-elliptical distributions is studied and the extension to multivariate distributions is also investigated.Comment: 15page

Bounding Stochastic Dependence, Complete Mixability of Matrices, and Multidimensional Bottleneck Assignment Problems

We call a matrix completely mixable if the entries in its columns can be permuted so that all row sums are equal. If it is not completely mixable, we want to determine the smallest maximal and largest minimal row sum attainable. These values provide a discrete approximation of of minimum variance problems for discrete distributions, a problem motivated by the question how to estimate the $\alpha$-quantile of an aggregate random variable with unknown dependence structure given the marginals of the constituent random variables. We relate this problem to the multidimensional bottleneck assignment problem and show that there exists a polynomial $2$-approximation algorithm if the matrix has only $3$ columns. In general, deciding complete mixability is $\mathcal{NP}$-complete. In particular the swapping algorithm of Puccetti et al. is not an exact method unless $\mathcal{NP}\subseteq\mathcal{ZPP}$. For a fixed number of columns it remains $\mathcal{NP}$-complete, but there exists a PTAS. The problem can be solved in pseudopolynomial time for a fixed number of rows, and even in polynomial time if all columns furthermore contain entries from the same multiset

Centers of probability measures without the mean

In the recent years, the notion of mixability has been developed with applications to operations research, optimal transportation, and quantitative finance. An n-tuple of distributions is said to be jointly mixable if there exist n random variables following these distributions and adding up to a constant, called center, with probability one. When the n distributions are identical, we speak of complete mixability. If each distribution has finite mean, the center is obviously the sum of the means. In this paper, we investigate the set of centers of completely and jointly mixable distributions not having a finite mean. In addition to several results, we show the (possibly counterintuitive) fact that, for each (Formula presented.), there exist n standard Cauchy random variables adding up to a constant C if and only if (Formula presented.

Composite multiclass losses

We consider loss functions for multiclass prediction problems. We show when a multiclass loss can be expressed as a “proper composite loss”, which is the composition of a proper loss and a link function. We extend existing results for binary losses to multiclass losses. We subsume results on “classification calibration” by relating it to properness. We determine the stationarity condition, Bregman representation, order-sensitivity, and quasi-convexity of multiclass proper losses. We then characterise the existence and uniqueness of the composite representation formulti class losses. We show how the composite representation is related to other core properties of a loss: mixability, admissibility and (strong) convexity of multiclass losses which we characterise in terms of the Hessian of the Bayes risk. We show that the simple integral representation for binary proper losses can not be extended to multiclass losses but offer concrete guidance regarding how to design different loss functions. The conclusion drawn from these results is that the proper composite representation is a natural and convenient tool for the design of multiclass loss functions