Detecting a Vector Based on Linear Measurements

We consider a situation where the state of a system is represented by a real-valued vector. Under normal circumstances, the vector is zero, while an event manifests as non-zero entries in this vector, possibly few. Our interest is in the design of algorithms that can reliably detect events (i.e., test whether the vector is zero or not) with the least amount of information. We place ourselves in a situation, now common in the signal processing literature, where information about the vector comes in the form of noisy linear measurements. We derive information bounds in an active learning setup and exhibit some simple near-optimal algorithms. In particular, our results show that the task of detection within this setting is at once much easier, simpler and different than the tasks of estimation and support recovery

The Sparse Poisson Means Model

We consider the problem of detecting a sparse Poisson mixture. Our results parallel those for the detection of a sparse normal mixture, pioneered by Ingster (1997) and Donoho and Jin (2004), when the Poisson means are larger than logarithmic in the sample size. In particular, a form of higher criticism achieves the detection boundary in the whole sparse regime. When the Poisson means are smaller than logarithmic in the sample size, a different regime arises in which simple multiple testing with Bonferroni correction is enough in the sparse regime. We present some numerical experiments that confirm our theoretical findings

On the convergence of maximum variance unfolding

Maximum Variance Unfolding is one of the main methods for (nonlinear) dimensionality reduction. We study its large sample limit, providing specific rates of convergence under standard assumptions. We find that it is consistent when the underlying submanifold is isometric to a convex subset, and we provide some simple examples where it fails to be consistent