Symmetry arises often when learning from high dimensional data. For example, data sets consisting of point clouds, graphs, and unordered sets appear routinely in contemporary applications, and exhibit rich underlying symmetries. Understanding the benefits of symmetry on the statistical and numerical efficiency of learning algorithms is an active area of research. In this work, we show that symmetry has a pronounced impact on the rank of kernel matrices. Specifically, we compute the rank of a polynomial kernel of fixed degree that is invariant under various groups acting independently on its two arguments. In concrete circumstances, including the three aforementioned examples, symmetry dramatically decreases the rank making it independent of the data dimension. In such settings, we show that a simple regression procedure is minimax optimal for estimating an invariant polynomial from finitely many samples drawn across different dimensions. We complete the paper with numerical experiments that illustrate our findings.

Classical results in asymptotic statistics show that the Fisher information matrix controls the difficulty of estimating a statistical model from observed data. In this work, we introduce a companion measure of robustness of an estimation problem: the radius of statistical efficiency (RSE) is the size of the smallest perturbation to the problem data that renders the Fisher information matrix singular. We compute RSE up to numerical constants for a variety of test bed problems, including principal component analysis, generalized linear models, phase retrieval, bilinear sensing, and matrix completion. In all cases, the RSE quantifies the compatibility between the covariance of the population data and the latent model parameter. Interestingly, we observe a precise reciprocal relationship between RSE and the intrinsic complexity/sensitivity of the problem instance, paralleling the classical Eckart-Young theorem in numerical analysis.

This paper introduces two randomized preconditioning techniques for robustly solving kernel ridge regression (KRR) problems with a medium to large number of data points ($10^4 \leq N \leq 10^7$). The first method, RPCholesky preconditioning, is capable of accurately solving the full-data KRR problem in $O(N^2)$ arithmetic operations, assuming sufficiently rapid polynomial decay of the kernel matrix eigenvalues. The second method, KRILL preconditioning, offers an accurate solution to a restricted version of the KRR problem involving $k \ll N$ selected data centers at a cost of $O((N + k^2) k \log k)$ operations. The proposed methods solve a broad range of KRR problems and overcome the failure modes of previous KRR preconditioners, making them ideal for practical applications.

Traditional supervised learning aims to learn an unknown mapping by fitting a function to a set of input-output pairs with a fixed dimension. The fitted function is then defined on inputs of the same dimension. However, in many settings, the unknown mapping takes inputs in any dimension; examples include graph parameters defined on graphs of any size and physics quantities defined on an arbitrary number of particles. We leverage a newly-discovered phenomenon in algebraic topology, called representation stability, to define equivariant neural networks that can be trained with data in a fixed dimension and then extended to accept inputs in any dimension. Our approach is user-friendly, requiring only the network architecture and the groups for equivariance, and can be combined with any training procedure. We provide a simple open-source implementation of our methods and offer preliminary numerical experiments.

Recent work has shown that stochastically perturbed gradient methods can efficiently escape strict saddle points of smooth functions. We extend this body of work to nonsmooth optimization, by analyzing an inexact analogue of a stochastically perturbed gradient method applied to the Moreau envelope. The main conclusion is that a variety of algorithms for nonsmooth optimization can escape strict saddle points of the Moreau envelope at a controlled rate. The main technical insight is that typical algorithms applied to the proximal subproblem yield directions that approximate the gradient of the Moreau envelope in relative terms.

For data living in a manifold $M\subseteq \mathbb{R}^m$ and a point $p\in M$ we consider a statistic $U_{k,n}$ which estimates the variance of the angle between pairs of vectors $X_i-p$ and $X_j-p$, for data points $X_i$, $X_j$, near $p$, and evaluate this statistic as a tool for estimation of the intrinsic dimension of $M$ at $p$. Consistency of the local dimension estimator is established and the asymptotic distribution of $U_{k,n}$ is found under minimal regularity assumptions. Performance of the proposed methodology is compared against state-of-the-art methods on simulated data.