1,151 research outputs found
Approximations of Semicontinuous Functions with Applications to Stochastic Optimization and Statistical Estimation
Upper semicontinuous (usc) functions arise in the analysis of maximization
problems, distributionally robust optimization, and function identification,
which includes many problems of nonparametric statistics. We establish that
every usc function is the limit of a hypo-converging sequence of piecewise
affine functions of the difference-of-max type and illustrate resulting
algorithmic possibilities in the context of approximate solution of
infinite-dimensional optimization problems. In an effort to quantify the ease
with which classes of usc functions can be approximated by finite collections,
we provide upper and lower bounds on covering numbers for bounded sets of usc
functions under the Attouch-Wets distance. The result is applied in the context
of stochastic optimization problems defined over spaces of usc functions. We
establish confidence regions for optimal solutions based on sample average
approximations and examine the accompanying rates of convergence. Examples from
nonparametric statistics illustrate the results
Optimality of Poisson processes intensity learning with Gaussian processes
In this paper we provide theoretical support for the so-called "Sigmoidal
Gaussian Cox Process" approach to learning the intensity of an inhomogeneous
Poisson process on a -dimensional domain. This method was proposed by Adams,
Murray and MacKay (ICML, 2009), who developed a tractable computational
approach and showed in simulation and real data experiments that it can work
quite satisfactorily. The results presented in the present paper provide
theoretical underpinning of the method. In particular, we show how to tune the
priors on the hyper parameters of the model in order for the procedure to
automatically adapt to the degree of smoothness of the unknown intensity and to
achieve optimal convergence rates
Nonparametric Bayesian estimation of a H\"older continuous diffusion coefficient
We consider a nonparametric Bayesian approach to estimate the diffusion
coefficient of a stochastic differential equation given discrete time
observations over a fixed time interval. As a prior on the diffusion
coefficient, we employ a histogram-type prior with piecewise constant
realisations on bins forming a partition of the time interval. Specifically,
these constants are realizations of independent inverse Gamma distributed
randoma variables. We justify our approach by deriving the rate at which the
corresponding posterior distribution asymptotically concentrates around the
data-generating diffusion coefficient. This posterior contraction rate turns
out to be optimal for estimation of a H\"older-continuous diffusion coefficient
with smoothness parameter Our approach is straightforward to
implement, as the posterior distributions turn out to be inverse Gamma again,
and leads to good practical results in a wide range of simulation examples.
Finally, we apply our method on exchange rate data sets
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