We address the Statistical Process Control (SPC) of high-dimensional, dynamic industrial processes from two complementary perspectives: manifold fitting and manifold learning, both of which assume data lies on an underlying nonlinear, lower dimensional space. We propose two distinct monitoring frameworks for online or 'phase II' Statistical Process Control (SPC). The first method leverages state-of-the-art techniques in manifold fitting to accurately approximate the manifold where the data resides within the ambient high-dimensional space. It then monitors deviations from this manifold using a novel scalar distribution-free control chart. In contrast, the second method adopts a more traditional approach, akin to those used in linear dimensionality reduction SPC techniques, by first embedding the data into a lower-dimensional space before monitoring the embedded observations. We prove how both methods provide a controllable Type I error probability, after which they are contrasted for their corresponding fault detection ability. Extensive numerical experiments on a synthetic process and on a replicated Tennessee Eastman Process show that the conceptually simpler manifold-fitting approach achieves performance competitive with, and sometimes superior to, the more classical lower-dimensional manifold monitoring methods. In addition, we demonstrate the practical applicability of the proposed manifold-fitting approach by successfully detecting surface anomalies in a real image dataset of electrical commutators.

We consider the solvable neural scaling model with three parameters: data complexity, target complexity, and model-parameter-count. We use this neural scaling model to derive new predictions about the compute-limited, infinite-data scaling law regime. To train the neural scaling model, we run one-pass stochastic gradient descent on a mean-squared loss. We derive a representation of the loss curves which holds over all iteration counts and improves in accuracy as the model parameter count grows. The phase boundaries are determined by the relative importance of model capacity, optimizer noise, and embedding of the features.

Collusion is a complex phenomenon in which companies secretly collaborate to engage in fraudulent practices. This paper presents an innovative methodology for detecting and predicting collusion patterns in different national markets using neural networks (NNs) and graph neural networks (GNNs). GNNs are particularly well suited to this task because they can exploit the inherent network structures present in collusion and many other economic problems. Our approach consists of two phases: In Phase I, we develop and train models on individual market datasets from Japan, the United States, two regions in Switzerland, Italy, and Brazil, focusing on predicting collusion in single markets. In Phase II, we extend the models' applicability through zero-shot learning, employing a transfer learning approach that can detect collusion in markets in which training data is unavailable. This phase also incorporates out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization to evaluate the models' performance on unseen datasets from other countries and regions. In our empirical study, we show that GNNs outperform NNs in detecting complex collusive patterns. This research contributes to the ongoing discourse on preventing collusion and optimizing detection methodologies, providing valuable guidance on the use of NNs and GNNs in economic applications to enhance market fairness and economic welfare.

In the regret-based formulation of multi-armed bandit (MAB) problems, except in rare instances, much of the literature focuses on arms with i.i.d. rewards. In this paper, we consider the problem of obtaining regret guarantees for MAB problems in which the rewards of each arm form a Markov chain which may not belong to a single parameter exponential family. To achieve logarithmic regret in such problems is not difficult: a variation of standard KL-UCB does the job. However, the constants obtained from such an analysis are poor for the following reason: i.i.d. rewards are a special case of Markov rewards and it is difficult to design an algorithm that works well independent of whether the underlying model is truly Markovian or i.i.d. To overcome this issue, we introduce a novel algorithm that identifies whether the rewards from each arm are truly Markovian or i.i.d. using a Hellinger distance-based test. Our algorithm then switches from using a standard KL-UCB to a specialized version of KL-UCB when it determines that the arm reward is Markovian, thus resulting in low regret for both i.i.d. and Markovian settings.