Regression
Differentially Private Conformal Prediction
Wu, Jiamei, Zhang, Ce, Cai, Zhipeng, Kong, Jingsen, Jiang, Bei, Kong, Linglong, Kong, Lingchen
Conformal prediction (CP) has attracted broad attention as a simple and flexible framework for uncertainty quantification through prediction sets. In this work, we study how to deploy CP under differential privacy (DP) in a statistically efficient manner. We first introduce differential CP, a non-splitting conformal procedure that avoids the efficiency loss caused by data splitting and serves as a bridge between oracle CP and private conformal inference. By exploiting the stability properties of DP mechanisms, differential CP establishes a direct connection to oracle CP and inherits corresponding validity behavior. Building on this idea, we develop Differentially Private Conformal Prediction (DPCP), a fully private procedure that combines DP model training with a private quantile mechanism for calibration. We establish the end-to-end privacy guarantee of DPCP and investigate its coverage properties under additional regularity conditions. We further study the efficiency of both differential CP and DPCP under empirical risk minimization and general regression models, showing that DPCP can produce tighter prediction sets than existing private split conformal approaches under the same privacy budget. Numerical experiments on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate the practical effectiveness of the proposed methods.
A proposal for PU classification under Non-SCAR using clustering and logistic model
Furmanczyk, Konrad, Paczutkowski, Kacper
The present study aims to investigate a cluster cleaning algorithm that is both computationally simple and capable of solving the PU classification when the SCAR condition is unsatisfied. A secondary objective of this study is to determine the robustness of the LassoJoint method to perturbations of the SCAR condition. In the first step of our algorithm, we obtain cleaning labels from 2-means clustering. Subsequently, we perform logistic regression on the cleaned data, assigning positive labels from the cleaning algorithm with additional true positive observations. The remaining observations are assigned the negative label. The proposed algorithm is evaluated by comparing 11 real data sets from machine learning repositories and a synthetic set. The findings obtained from this study demonstrate the efficacy of the clustering algorithm in scenarios where the SCAR condition is violated and further underscore the moderate robustness of the LassoJoint algorithm in this context.
Generative Augmented Inference
Lu, Cheng, Wang, Mengxin, Zhang, Dennis J., Zhang, Heng
Data-driven operations management often relies on parameters estimated from costly human-generated labels. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and other AI systems offer inexpensive auxiliary data, but introduce a new challenge: AI outputs are not direct observations of the target outcomes, but could involve high-dimensional representations with complex and unknown relationships to human labels. Conventional methods leverage AI predictions as direct proxies for true labels, which can be inefficient or unreliable when this relationship is weak or misspecified. We propose Generative Augmented Inference (GAI), a general framework that incorporates AI-generated outputs as informative features for estimating models of human-labeled outcomes. GAI uses an orthogonal moment construction that enables consistent estimation and valid inference with flexible, nonparametric relationship between LLM-generated outputs and human labels. We establish asymptotic normality and show a "safe default" property: relative to human-data-only estimators, GAI weakly improves estimation efficiency under arbitrary auxiliary signals and yields strict gains whenever the auxiliary information is predictive. Empirically, GAI outperforms benchmarks across diverse settings. In conjoint analysis with weak auxiliary signals, GAI reduces estimation error by about 50% and lowers human labeling requirements by over 75%. In retail pricing, where all methods access the same auxiliary inputs, GAI consistently outperforms alternative estimators, highlighting the value of its construction rather than differences in information. In health insurance choice, it cuts labeling requirements by over 90% while maintaining decision accuracy. Across applications, GAI improves confidence interval coverage without inflating width. Overall, GAI provides a principled and scalable approach to integrating AI-generated information.
Early-stopped aggregation: Adaptive inference with computational efficiency
Ohn, Ilsang, Fan, Shitao, Jun, Jungbin, Lin, Lizhen
When considering a model selection or, more generally, an aggregation approach for adaptive statistical inference, it is often necessary to compute estimators over a wide range of model complexities including unnecessarily large models even when the true data-generating process is relatively simple, due to the lack of prior knowledge. This requirement can lead to substantial computational inefficiency. In this work, we propose a novel framework for efficient model aggregation called the early-stopped aggregation (ESA): instead of computing and aggregating estimators for all candidate models, we compute only a small number of simpler ones using an early-stopping criterion and aggregate only these for final inference. Our framework is versatile and applies to both Bayesian model selection, in particular, within the variational Bayes framework, and frequentist estimation, including a general penalized estimation setting. We investigate adaptive optimal property of the ESA approach across three learning paradigms. We first show that ESA achieves optimal adaptive contraction rates in the variational Bayes setting under mild conditions. We extend this result to variational empirical Bayes, where prior hyperparameters are chosen in a data-dependent manner. In addition, we apply the ESA approach to frequentist aggregation including both penalization-based and sample-splitting implementations, and establish corresponding theory. As we demonstrate, there is a clear unification between early-stopped Bayes and frequentist penalized aggregation, with a common "energy" functional comprising a data-fitting term and a complexity-control term that drives both procedures. We further present several applications and numerical studies that highlight the efficiency and strong performance of the proposed approach.
Orthogonal machine learning for conditional odds and risk ratios
Conditional effects are commonly used measures for understanding how treatment effects vary across different groups, and are often used to target treatments/interventions to groups who benefit most. In this work we review existing methods and propose novel ones, focusing on the odds ratio (OR) and the risk ratio (RR). While estimation of the conditional average treatment effect (ATE) has been widely studied, estimators for the OR and RR lag behind, and cutting edge estimators such as those based on doubly robust transformations or orthogonal risk functions have not been generalized to these parameters. We propose such a generalization here, focusing on the DR-learner and the R-learner. We derive orthogonal risk functions for the OR and RR and show that the associated pseudo-outcomes satisfy second-order conditional-mean remainder properties analogous to the ATE case. We also evaluate estimators for the conditional ATE, OR, and RR in a comprehensive nonparametric Monte Carlo simulation study to compare them with common alternatives under hundreds of different data-generating distributions. Our numerical studies provide empirical guidance for choosing an estimator. For instance, they show that while parametric models are useful in very simple settings, the proposed nonparametric estimators significantly reduce bias and mean squared error in the more complex settings expected in the real world. We illustrate the methods in the analysis of physical activity and sleep trouble in U.S. adults using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). The results demonstrate that our estimators uncover substantial treatment effect heterogeneity that is obscured by traditional regression approaches and lead to improved treatment decision rules, highlighting the importance of data-adaptive methods for advancing precision health research.
Expectation Maximization (EM) Converges for General Agnostic Mixtures
Mixture of linear regression is well studied in statistics and machine learning, where the data points are generated probabilistically using $k$ linear models. Algorithms like Expectation Maximization (EM) may be used to recover the ground truth regressors for this problem. Recently, in \cite{pal2022learning,ghosh_agnostic} the mixed linear regression problem is studied in the agnostic setting, where no generative model on data is assumed. Rather, given a set of data points, the objective is \emph{fit} $k$ lines by minimizing a suitable loss function. It is shown that a modification of EM, namely gradient EM converges exponentially to appropriately defined loss minimizer even in the agnostic setting. In this paper, we study the problem of \emph{fitting} $k$ parametric functions to given set of data points. We adhere to the agnostic setup. However, instead of fitting lines equipped with quadratic loss, we consider any arbitrary parametric function fitting equipped with a strongly convex and smooth loss. This framework encompasses a large class of problems including mixed linear regression (regularized), mixed linear classifiers (mixed logistic regression, mixed Support Vector Machines) and mixed generalized linear regression. We propose and analyze gradient EM for this problem and show that with proper initialization and separation condition, the iterates of gradient EM converge exponentially to appropriately defined population loss minimizers with high probability. This shows the effectiveness of EM type algorithm which converges to \emph{optimal} solution in the non-generative setup beyond mixture of linear regression.
A Muon-Accelerated Algorithm for Low Separation Rank Tensor Generalized Linear Models
Tensor-valued data arise naturally in multidimensional signal and imaging problems, such as biomedical imaging. When incorporated into generalized linear models (GLMs), naive vectorization can destroy their multi-way structure and lead to high-dimensional, ill-posed estimation. To address this challenge, Low Separation Rank (LSR) decompositions reduce model complexity by imposing low-rank multilinear structure on the coefficient tensor. A representative approach for estimating LSR-based tensor GLMs (LSR-TGLMs) is the Low Separation Rank Tensor Regression (LSRTR) algorithm, which adopts block coordinate descent and enforces orthogonality of the factor matrices through repeated QR-based projections. However, the repeated projection steps can be computationally demanding and slow convergence. Motivated by the need for scalable estimation and classification from such data, we propose LSRTR-M, which incorporates Muon (MomentUm Orthogonalized by Newton-Schulz) updates into the LSRTR framework. Specifically, LSRTR-M preserves the original block coordinate scheme while replacing the projection-based factor updates with Muon steps. Across synthetic linear, logistic, and Poisson LSR-TGLMs, LSRTR-M converges faster in both iteration count and wall-clock time, while achieving lower normalized estimation and prediction errors. On the Vessel MNIST 3D task, it further improves computational efficiency while maintaining competitive classification performance.
Fused Multinomial Logistic Regression Utilizing Summary-Level External Machine-learning Information
In many modern applications, a carefully designed primary study provides individual-level data for interpretable modeling, while summary-level external information is available through black-box, efficient, and nonparametric machine-learning predictions. Although summary-level external information has been studied in the data integration literature, there is limited methodology for leveraging external nonparametric machine-learning predictions to improve statistical inference in the primary study. We propose a general empirical-likelihood framework that incorporates external predictions through moment constraints. An advantage of nonparametric machine-learning prediction is that it induces a rich class of valid moment restrictions that remain robust to covariate shift under a mild overlap condition without requiring explicit density-ratio modeling. We focus on multinomial logistic regression as the primary model and address common data-quality issues in external sources, including coarsened outcomes, partially observed covariates, covariate shift, and heterogeneity in generating mechanisms known as concept shift. We establish large-sample properties of the resulting fused estimator, including consistency and asymptotic normality under regularity conditions. Moreover, we provide mild sufficient conditions under which incorporating external predictions delivers a strict efficiency gain relative to the primary-only estimator. Simulation studies and an application to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey on multiclass blood-pressure classification.
The Generalised Kernel Covariance Measure
Bergen, Luca, Sejdinovic, Dino, Didelez, Vanessa
We consider the problem of conditional independence (CI) testing and adopt a kernel-based approach. Kernel-based CI tests embed variables in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces, regress their embeddings on the conditioning variables, and test the resulting residuals for marginal independence. This approach yields tests that are sensitive to a broad range of conditional dependencies. Existing methods, however, rely heavily on kernel ridge regression, which is computationally expensive when properly tuned and yields poorly calibrated tests when left untuned, which limits their practical usefulness. We propose the Generalised Kernel Covariance Measure (GKCM), a regression-model-agnostic kernel-based CI test that accommodates a broad class of regression estimators. Building on the Generalised Hilbertian Covariance Measure framework (Lundborg et al., 2022), we characterise conditions under which GKCM satisfies uniform asymptotic level guarantees. In simulations, GKCM paired with tree-based regression models frequently outperforms state-of-the-art CI tests across a diverse range of data-generating processes, achieving better type I error control and competitive or superior power.
Learning interacting particle systems from unlabeled data
Learning the potentials of interacting particle systems is a fundamental task across various scientific disciplines. A major challenge is that unlabeled data collected at discrete time points lack trajectory information due to limitations in data collection methods or privacy constraints. We address this challenge by introducing a trajectory-free self-test loss function that leverages the weak-form stochastic evolution equation of the empirical distribution. The loss function is quadratic in potentials, supporting parametric and nonparametric regression algorithms for robust estimation that scale to large, high-dimensional systems with big data. Systematic numerical tests show that our method outperforms baseline methods that regress on trajectories recovered via label matching, tolerating large observation time steps. We establish the convergence of parametric estimators as the sample size increases, providing a theoretical foundation for the proposed approach.