Roberto Casarin’s talk at CREST tomorrow

My former student and friend Roberto Casarin (University Ca’Foscari, Venice) will talk tomorrow at the CREST Financial Econometrics seminar on

“Bayesian Markov Switching Tensor Regression for Time-varying Networks”

Time: 10:30
Date: 14 March 2019
Place: Room 3001, ENSAE, Université Paris-Saclay

Abstract : We propose a new Bayesian Markov switching regression model for multi-dimensional arrays (tensors) of binary time series. We assume a zero-inflated logit dynamics with time-varying parameters and apply it to multi-layer temporal networks. The original contribution is threefold. First, in order to avoid over-fitting we propose a parsimonious parameterisation of the model, based on a low-rank decomposition of the tensor of regression coefficients. Second, the parameters of the tensor model are driven by a hidden Markov chain, thus allowing for structural changes. The regimes are identified through prior constraints on the mixing probability of the zero-inflated model. Finally, we model the jointly dynamics of the network and of a set of variables of interest. We follow a Bayesian approach to inference, exploiting the Pólya-Gamma data augmentation scheme for logit models in order to provide an efficient Gibbs sampler for posterior approximation. We show the effectiveness of the sampler on simulated datasets of medium-big sizes, finally we apply the methodology to a real dataset of financial networks.

my [homonym] talk this afternoon at CREST [Paris-Saclay]

Christian ROBERT (Université Lyon 1) « How large is the jump discontinuity in the diffusion coefficient of an Itô diffusion?”

Time: 3:30 pm – 4:30 pm
Date: 04th of March 2019
Place: Room 3105

Abstract : We consider high frequency observations from a one-dimensional diffusion process Y. We assume that the diffusion coefficient σ is continuously differentiable, but with a jump discontinuity at some levely. Such a diffusion has already been considered as a local volatility model for the underlying price of an asset, but raises several issues for pricing European options or for hedging such derivatives. We introduce kernel sign-constrained estimators of the left and right limits of σ at y, but up to constant factors. We present and discuss the asymptotic properties of these kernel estimators.  We then propose a method to evaluate these constant factors by looking for bandwiths for which the kernel estimators are stable by iteration. We finally provide an estimator of the jump discontinuity size and discuss its convergence rate.

Bayesian intelligence in Warwick

This is an announcement for an exciting CRiSM Day in Warwick on 20 March 2019: with speakers

10:00-11:00 Xiao-Li Meng (Harvard): “Artificial Bayesian Monte Carlo Integration: A Practical Resolution to the Bayesian (Normalizing Constant) Paradox”

11:00-12:00 Julien Stoehr (Dauphine): “Gibbs sampling and ABC”

14:00-15:00 Arthur Ulysse Jacot-Guillarmod (École Polytechnique Fedérale de Lausanne): “Neural Tangent Kernel: Convergence and Generalization of Deep Neural Networks”

15:00-16:00 Antonietta Mira (Università della Svizzera italiana e Università degli studi dell’Insubria): “Bayesian identifications of the data intrinsic dimensions”

[whose abstracts are on the workshop webpage] and free attendance. The title for the workshop mentions Bayesian Intelligence: this obviously includes human intelligence and not just AI!

irreversible Markov chains

Werner Krauth (ENS, Paris) was in Dauphine today to present his papers on irreversible Markov chains at the probability seminar. He went back to the 1953 Metropolis et al. paper. And mentioned a 1962 paper I had never heard of by Alder and Wainwright demonstrating phase transition can occur, via simulation. The whole talk was about simulating the stationary distribution of a large number of hard spheres on a one-dimensional ring, which made it hard for me to understand. (Maybe the triathlon before did not help.) And even to realise a part was about PDMPs… His slides included this interesting entry on factorised MCMC which reminded me of delayed acceptance and thinning and prefetching. Plus a notion of lifted Metropolis that could have applications in a general setting, if it differs from delayed rejection.

controlled sequential Monte Carlo [BiPS seminar]

The last BiPS seminar of the semester will be given by Jeremy Heng (Harvard) on Monday 11 June at 2pm, in room 3001, ENSAE, Paris-Saclay about his Controlled sequential Monte Carlo paper:

Sequential Monte Carlo methods, also known as particle methods, are a popular set of techniques to approximate high-dimensional probability distributions and their normalizing constants. They have found numerous applications in statistics and related fields as they can be applied to perform state estimation for non-linear non-Gaussian state space models and Bayesian inference for complex static models. Like many Monte Carlo sampling schemes, they rely on proposal distributions which have a crucial impact on their performance. We introduce here a class of controlled sequential Monte Carlo algorithms, where the proposal distributions are determined by approximating the solution to an associated optimal control problem using an iterative scheme. We provide theoretical analysis of our proposed methodology and demonstrate significant gains over state-of-the-art methods at a fixed computational complexity on a variety of applications.

complex Cauchys

During a visit of Don Fraser and Nancy Reid to Paris-Dauphine where Nancy gave a nice introduction to confidence distributions, Don pointed out to me a 1992 paper by Peter McCullagh on the Cauchy distribution. Following my recent foray into the estimation of the Cauchy location parameter. Among several most interesting aspects of the Cauchy, Peter re-expressed the density of a Cauchy C(θ¹,θ²) as

f(x;θ¹,θ²) = |θ²| / |x-θ|²

when θ=θ¹+ιθ² [a complex number on the half-plane]. Denoting the Cauchy C(θ¹,θ²) as Cauchy C(θ), the property that the ratio aX+b/cX+d follows a Cauchy for all real numbers a,b,c,d,

C(aθ+b/cθ+d)

[when X is C(θ)] follows rather readily. But then comes the remark that

“those properties follow immediately from the definition of the Cauchy as the ratio of two correlated normals with zero mean.”

which seems to relate to the conjecture solved by Natesh Pillai and Xiao-Li Meng a few years ago. But the fact that  a ratio of two correlated centred Normals is Cauchy is actually known at least from the1930’s, as shown by Feller (1930, Biometrika) and Geary (1930, JRSS B).

Bayesian regression trees [seminar]

During her visit to Paris, Veronika Rockovà (Chicago Booth) will give a talk in ENSAE-CREST on the Saclay Plateau at 2pm. Here is the abstract

Posterior Concentration for Bayesian Regression Trees and Ensembles
(joint with Stephanie van der Pas)Since their inception in the 1980’s, regression trees have been one of the more widely used non-parametric prediction methods. Tree-structured methods yield a histogram reconstruction of the regression surface, where the bins correspond to terminal nodes of recursive partitioning. Trees are powerful, yet  susceptible to over-fitting.  Strategies against overfitting have traditionally relied on  pruning  greedily grown trees. The Bayesian framework offers an alternative remedy against overfitting through priors. Roughly speaking, a good prior  charges smaller trees where overfitting does not occur. While the consistency of random histograms, trees and their ensembles  has been studied quite extensively, the theoretical understanding of the Bayesian counterparts has  been  missing. In this paper, we take a step towards understanding why/when do Bayesian trees and their ensembles not overfit. To address this question, we study the speed at which the posterior concentrates around the true smooth regression function. We propose a spike-and-tree variant of the popular Bayesian CART prior and establish new theoretical results showing that  regression trees (and their ensembles) (a) are capable of recovering smooth regression surfaces, achieving optimal rates up to a log factor, (b) can adapt to the unknown level of smoothness and (c) can perform effective dimension reduction when p>n. These results  provide a piece of missing theoretical evidence explaining why Bayesian trees (and additive variants thereof) have worked so well in practice.