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 evy process


Scalable Levy Process Priors for Spectral Kernel Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Gaussian processes are rich distributions over functions, with generalization properties determined by a kernel function. When used for long-range extrapolation, predictions are particularly sensitive to the choice of kernel parameters. It is therefore critical to account for kernel uncertainty in our predictive distributions. We propose a distribution over kernels formed by modelling a spectral mixture density with a L evy process. The resulting distribution has support for all stationary covariances--including the popular RBF, periodic, and Mat ern kernels-- combined with inductive biases which enable automatic and data efficient learning, long-range extrapolation, and state of the art predictive performance. The proposed model also presents an approach to spectral regularization, as the L evy process introduces a sparsity-inducing prior over mixture components, allowing automatic selection over model order and pruning of extraneous components. We exploit the algebraic structure of the proposed process for O (n) training and O (1) predictions. We perform extrapolations having reasonable uncertainty estimates on several benchmarks, show that the proposed model can recover flexible ground truth covariances and that it is robust to errors in initialization.


Rényi Differential Privacy for Heavy-Tailed SDEs via Fractional Poincaré Inequalities

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Characterizing the differential privacy (DP) of learning algorithms has become a major challenge in recent years. In parallel, many studies suggested investigating the behavior of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with heavy-tailed noise, both as a model for modern deep learning models and to improve their performance. However, most DP bounds focus on light-tailed noise, where satisfactory guarantees have been obtained but the proposed techniques do not directly extend to the heavy-tailed setting. Recently, the first DP guarantees for heavy-tailed SGD were obtained. These results provide $(0,δ)$-DP guarantees without requiring gradient clipping. Despite casting new light on the link between DP and heavy-tailed algorithms, these results have a strong dependence on the number of parameters and cannot be extended to other DP notions like the well-established Rényi differential privacy (RDP). In this work, we propose to address these limitations by deriving the first RDP guarantees for heavy-tailed SDEs, as well as their discretized counterparts. Our framework is based on new Rényi flow computations and the use of well-established fractional Poincaré inequalities. Under the assumption that such inequalities are satisfied, we obtain DP guarantees that have a much weaker dependence on the dimension compared to prior art.


Fast Likelihood-Free Parameter Estimation for Lévy Processes

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Lévy processes are widely used in financial modeling due to their ability to capture discontinuities and heavy tails, which are common in high-frequency asset return data. However, parameter estimation remains a challenge when associated likelihoods are unavailable or costly to compute. We propose a fast and accurate method for Lévy parameter estimation using the neural Bayes estimation (NBE) framework -- a simulation-based, likelihood-free approach that leverages permutation-invariant neural networks to approximate Bayes estimators. Through extensive simulations across several Lévy models, we show that NBE outperforms traditional methods in both accuracy and runtime, while also enabling rapid bootstrap-based uncertainty quantification. We illustrate our approach on a challenging high-frequency cryptocurrency return dataset, where the method captures evolving parameter dynamics and delivers reliable and interpretable inference at a fraction of the computational cost of traditional methods. NBE provides a scalable and practical solution for inference in complex financial models, enabling parameter estimation and uncertainty quantification over an entire year of data in just seconds. We additionally investigate nearly a decade of high-frequency Bitcoin returns, requiring less than one minute to estimate parameters under the proposed approach.


Extracting Governing Laws from Sample Path Data of Non-Gaussian Stochastic Dynamical Systems

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Advances in data science are leading to new progresses in the analysis and understanding of complex dynamics for systems with experimental and observational data. With numerous physical phenomena exhibiting bursting, flights, hopping, and intermittent features, stochastic differential equations with non-Gaussian L\'evy noise are suitable to model these systems. Thus it is desirable and essential to infer such equations from available data to reasonably predict dynamical behaviors. In this work, we consider a data-driven method to extract stochastic dynamical systems with non-Gaussian asymmetric (rather than the symmetric) L\'evy process, as well as Gaussian Brownian motion. We establish a theoretical framework and design a numerical algorithm to compute the asymmetric L\'evy jump measure, drift and diffusion (i.e., nonlocal Kramers-Moyal formulas), hence obtaining the stochastic governing law, from noisy data. Numerical experiments on several prototypical examples confirm the efficacy and accuracy of this method. This method will become an effective tool in discovering the governing laws from available data sets and in understanding the mechanisms underlying complex random phenomena.


Modelling and computation using NCoRM mixtures for density regression

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Normalized compound random measures are flexible nonparametric priors for related distributions. We consider building general nonparametric regression models using normalized compound random measure mixture models. Posterior inference is made using a novel pseudo-marginal Metropolis-Hastings sampler for normalized compound random measure mixture models. The algorithm makes use of a new general approach to the unbiased estimation of Laplace functionals of compound random measures (which includes completely random measures as a special case). The approach is illustrated on problems of density regression.