Oral 1: Learning theory / General ML

Moderators: Adrian Weller · Pierre Alquier

Mon 28 Mar 1:30 a.m. PDT — 2:30 a.m. PDT

Abstract:

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Mon 28 March 1:30 - 1:45 PDT

(Oral)
Denoising and change point localisation in piecewise-constant high-dimensional regression coefficients

Fan Wang · Oscar Madrid · Yi Yu · Alessandro Rinaldo

We study the theoretical properties of the fused lasso procedure originally proposed by \cite{tibshirani2005sparsity} in the context of a linear regression model in which the regression coefficient are totally ordered and assumed to be sparse and piecewise constant. Despite its popularity, to the best of our knowledge, estimation error bounds in high-dimensional settings have only been obtained for the simple case in which the design matrix is the identity matrix. We formulate a novel restricted isometry condition on the design matrix that is tailored to the fused lasso estimator and derive estimation bounds for both the constrained version of the fused lasso assuming dense coefficients and for its penalised version. We observe that the estimation error can be dominated by either the lasso or the fused lasso rate, depending on whether the number of non-zero coefficient is larger than the number of piece-wise constant segments. Finally, we devise a post-processing procedure to recover the piecewise-constant pattern of the coefficients. Extensive numerical experiments support our theoretical findings.

Mon 28 March 1:45 - 2:00 PDT

(Oral)
Noise Regularizes Over-parameterized Rank One Matrix Recovery, Provably

Tianyi Liu · Yan Li · Enlu Zhou · Tuo Zhao

We investigate the role of noise in optimization algorithms for learning over-parameterized models. Specifically, we consider the recovery of a rank one matrix $Y^*\in R^{d\times d}$ from a noisy observation $Y$ using an over-parameterization model. Specifically, we parameterize the rank one matrix $Y^*$ by $XX^\top$, where $X\in R^{d\times d}$. We then show that under mild conditions, the estimator, obtained by the randomly perturbed gradient descent algorithm using the square loss function, attains a mean square error of $O(\sigma^2/d)$, where $\sigma^2$ is the variance of the observational noise. In contrast, the estimator obtained by gradient descent without random perturbation only attains a mean square error of $O(\sigma^2)$. Our result partially justifies the implicit regularization effect of noise when learning over-parameterized models, and provides new understanding of training over-parameterized neural networks.

Mon 28 March 2:00 - 2:15 PDT

(Oral)
Survival regression with proper scoring rules and monotonic neural networks

David Rindt · Robert Hu · David Steinsaltz · Dino Sejdinovic

We consider frequently used scoring rules for right-censored survival regression models such as time-dependent concordance, survival-CRPS, integrated Brier score and integrated binomial log-likelihood, and prove that neither of them is a proper scoring rule. This means that the true survival distribution may be scored worse than incorrect distributions, leading to inaccurate estimation. We prove, in contrast to these scores, that the right-censored log-likelihood is a proper scoring rule, i.e. the highest expected score is achieved by the true distribution. Despite this, modern feed-forward neural-network-based survival regression models are unable to train and validate directly on right-censored log-likelihood, due to its intractability, and resort to the aforementioned alternatives, i.e. non-proper scoring rules. We therefore propose a simple novel survival regression method capable of directly optimizing log-likelihood using a monotonic restriction on the time-dependent weights, coined SurvivalMonotonic-net (SuMo-net). SuMo-net achieves state-of-the-art log-likelihood scores across several datasets with 20--100x computational speedup on inference over existing state-of-the-art neural methods and is readily applicable to datasets with several million observations.

Mon 28 March 2:15 - 2:30 PDT

(Oral)
Multivariate Quantile Function Forecaster

Kelvin Kan · François-Xavier Aubet · Tim Januschowski · Youngsuk Park · Konstantinos Benidis · Lars Ruthotto · Jan Gasthaus

We propose Multivariate Quantile Function Forecaster (MQF2), a global probabilistic forecasting method constructed using a multivariate quantile function and investigate its application to multi-horizon forecasting. Prior approaches are either autoregressive, implicitly capturing the dependency structure across time but exhibiting error accumulation with increasing forecast horizons, or multi-horizon sequence-to-sequence models, which do not exhibit error accumulation, but also do typically not model the dependency structure across time steps. MQF2 combines the benefits of both approaches, by directly making predictions in the form of a multivariate quantile function, defined as the gradient of a convex function which we parametrize using input-convex neural networks. By design, the quantile function is monotone with respect to the input quantile levels and hence avoids quantile crossing. We provide two options to train MQF2: with energy score or with maximum likelihood. Experimental results on real-world and synthetic datasets show that our model has comparable performance with state-of-the-art methods in terms of single time step metrics while capturing the time dependency structure.