We study the problem of model selection among probabilistic forecasting models evaluated on datasets of multiple time series. The performance of a model on a single time series is quantified by the average value (score) of a proper scoring rule over a test set, but extending model selection to data sets of time series requires aggregating these scores. Common approaches either rely on scaling scores and averaging them (mean scaled score) or avoid scaling by using alternative statistics such as mean ranks or win rates. However, these approaches can yield conflicting conclusions. We show that such discrepancies arise from the skewness of the distribution of the scores, which is particularly pronounced when test sets are short. The skewness can cause non-mean criteria (e.g., mean rank, median, win rate) to select misspecified models. In contrast, the mean score is immune from this problem. We further show that, as the size of the test sets increases, all aggregation criteria converge to the same model selection decision, mitigating these discrepancies. Our experiments on intermittent demand time series, including data from the M5 competition, highlight the importance of sufficiently large test sets; the mean scaled score appears to be the more reliable approach, also because empirically we found its decision to remain consistent when different scaling factors are adopted.

We ask: when do Bayesian model averaging (BMA) weights over decision trees carry sufficient epistemic information to justify committed exploitation of the averaging distribution? We answer this question in closed form for Bayesian decision trees (BDTs) with Dirichlet-Multinomial leaf models and a Catalan-exponential tree-size prior (Schetinin&Jakaite, 2025), establishing a complete non-asymptotic theory of rational commitment thresholds.

Recent years have witnessed substantial progress in understanding the behavior of EM for mixture models that are correctly specified. Given that model misspecification is common in practice, it is important to understand EM in this more general setting. We provide non-asymptotic guarantees for the population and sample-based EM algorithms when used to estimate parameters of certain misspecified Gaussian mixture models.

Recent years have witnessed substantial progress in understanding the behavior of EM for mixture models that are correctly specified.

This document contains supplementary materials for the paper "Learning of Discrete Graphical Models with Neural Networks". This is an adversarial experiment for NeurISE when compared to GRISE. GRISE will learn this model in the second level of its hierarchy with O(p) parameters per optimization. The neural net used here is [d=3, w=15]. The θ parameters here are chosen uniformly from [0.3,1.3].

Recently formalized as the value equivalence principle, this algorithmic technique is perhaps unavoidable as real-world reinforcement learning demands consideration of a simple, computationally-bounded agent interacting with an overwhelmingly complex environment, whose underlying dynamics likely exceed the agent's capacity for representation. In this work, we consider the scenario where agent limitations may entirely preclude identifying an exactly value-equivalent model, immediately giving rise to a trade-off between identifying a model that is simple enough to learn while only incurring bounded sub-optimality.

Graphical models are widely used in science to represent joint probability distributions with an underlying conditional dependence structure. The inverse problem of learning a discrete graphical model given i.i.d samples from its joint distribution can be solved with near-optimal sample complexity using a convex optimization method known as Generalized Regularized Interaction Screening Estimator (GRISE). But the computational cost of GRISE becomes prohibitive when the energy function of the true graphical model has higher order terms. We introduce NeurISE, a neural net based algorithm for graphical model learning, to tackle this limitation of GRISE. We use neural nets as function approximators in an Interaction Screening objective function.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/