We consider the problem of inferring the directed, causal graph from observational data, assuming no hidden confounders. We take an information theoretic approach, and make three main contributions. First, we show how through algorithmic information theory we can obtain SCI, a highly robust, effective and computationally efficient test for conditional independence---and show it outperforms the state of the art when applied in constraint-based inference methods such as stable PC. Second, building upon on SCI, we show how to tell apart the parents and children of a given node based on the algorithmic Markov condition. We give the Climb algorithm to efficiently discover the directed, causal Markov blanket---and show it is at least as accurate as inferring the global network, while being much more efficient. Last, but not least, we detail how we can use the Climb score to direct those edges that state of the art causal discovery algorithms based on PC or GES leave undirected---and show this improves their precision, recall and F1 scores by up to 20 .
Many methods for discovering Markov blankets and causal networks rely on conditional independence tests @cite_15 @cite_4 ---which, by conditioning on the empty set, can also be used to measure association. For discrete data, the state of the art commonly relies on either the @math test or conditional mutual information (CMI) @cite_15 @cite_29 @cite_14 . Both measures, however, have drawbacks. The @math test is biased to independence when only limited data is available, whereas CMI has the opposite problem. In particular, it holds that @math for any @math , even if @math . For both @math and CMI it is necessary to define a significance threshold or cut-off, which can be arbitrary. Our proposed method based on algorithmic independence overcomes these limitations.
@cite_14 @cite_15 @cite_29 @cite_4
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We investigate the minimization of Newton's functional for the problem of the body of minimal resistance with maximal height @math cite butt in the class of convex developable functions defined in a disc. This class is a natural candidate to find a (non-radial) minimizer in accordance with the results of cite lrp2. We prove that the minimizer in this class has a minimal set in the form of a regular polygon with @math sides centered in the disc, and numerical experiments indicate that the natural number @math is a non-decreasing function of @math . The corresponding functions all achieve a lower value of the functional than the optimal radially symmetric function with the same height @math . Abstract Irregular sampling and “stable sampling” of band-limited functions have been studied by H.J. Landau [H.J. Landau, Necessary density conditions for sampling and interpolation of certain entire functions, Acta Math. 117 (1967) 37–52]. We prove that quasicrystals are sets of stable sampling. To cite this article: B. Matei, Y. Meyer, C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris, Ser. I 346 (2008). Many machine learning tasks, such as learning with invariance and policy evaluation in reinforcement learning, can be characterized as problems of learning from conditional distributions. In such problems, each sample @math itself is associated with a conditional distribution @math represented by samples @math , and the goal is to learn a function @math that links these conditional distributions to target values @math . These learning problems become very challenging when we only have limited samples or in the extreme case only one sample from each conditional distribution. Commonly used approaches either assume that @math is independent of @math , or require an overwhelmingly large samples from each conditional distribution. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach which employs a new min-max reformulation of the learning from conditional distribution problem. With such new reformulation, we only need to deal with the joint distribution @math . We also design an efficient learning algorithm, Embedding-SGD, and establish theoretical sample complexity for such problems. Finally, our numerical experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets show that the proposed approach can significantly improve over the existing algorithms. We consider a large class of random geometric graphs constructed from samples @math of independent, identically distributed observations of an underlying probability measure @math on a bounded domain @math . The popular modularity' clustering method specifies a partition @math of the set @math as the solution of an optimization problem. In this paper, under conditions on @math and @math , we derive scaling limits of the modularity clustering on random geometric graphs. Among other results, we show a geometric form of consistency: When the number of clusters is a priori bounded above, the discrete optimal partitions @math converge in a certain sense to a continuum partition @math of the underlying domain @math , characterized as the solution of a type of Kelvin's shape optimization problem. Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to suggest an alternative to the widely used Times Cited criterion for analysing citation networks. The approach involves taking account of the natures of the papers that cite a given paper, so as to differentiate between papers that attract the same number of citations.Design methodology approach – ArticleRank is an algorithm that has been derived from Google's PageRank algorithm to measure the influence of journal articles. ArticleRank is applied to two datasets – a citation network based on an early paper on webometrics, and a self‐citation network based on the 19 most cited papers in the Journal of Documentation – using citation data taken from the Web of Knowledge database.Findings – ArticleRank values provide a different ranking of a set of papers from that provided by the corresponding Times Cited values, and overcomes the inability of the latter to differentiate between papers with the same numbers of citations. The difference in rankings between Times Cited ... With the tremendous amount of research publications, recommending relevant papers to researchers to fulfill their information need becomes a significant problem. The major challenge to be tackled by our work is that given a target paper, how to effectively recommend a set of relevant papers from an existing citation network. In this paper, we propose a novel method to address the problem by incorporating various citation relations for a proper set of papers, which are more relevant but with a very limited size. The proposed method has two unique properties. Firstly, a metric called Local Relation Strength is defined to measure the dependency between cited and citing papers. Secondly, a model called Global Relation Strength is proposed to capture the relevance between two papers in the whole citation graph. We evaluate our proposed model on a real-world publication dataset and conduct an extensive comparison with the state-of-the-art baseline methods. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can have a promising improvement over the state-of-the-art techniques. The full' edge isoperimetric inequality for the discrete cube (due to Harper, Bernstein, Lindsay and Hart) specifies the minimum size of the edge boundary @math of a set @math , as a function of @math . A weaker (but more widely-used) lower bound is @math , where equality holds iff @math is a subcube. In 2011, the first author obtained a sharp stability' version of the latter result, proving that if @math , then there exists a subcube @math such that @math . The weak' version of the edge isoperimetric inequality has the following well-known generalization for the @math -biased' measure @math on the discrete cube: if @math , or if @math and @math is monotone increasing, then @math . In this paper, we prove a sharp stability version of the latter result, which generalizes the aforementioned result of the first author. Namely, we prove that if @math , then there exists a subcube @math such that @math , where @math . This result is a central component in recent work of the authors proving sharp stability versions of a number of Erd o s-Ko-Rado type theorems in extremal combinatorics, including the seminal complete intersection theorem' of Ahlswede and Khachatrian. In addition, we prove a biased-measure analogue of the full' edge isoperimetric inequality, for monotone increasing sets, and we observe that such an analogue does not hold for arbitrary sets, hence answering a question of Kalai. We use this result to give a new proof of the full' edge isoperimetric inequality, one relying on the Kruskal-Katona theorem. The focus of this paper is on the public communication required for generating a maximal-rate secret key (SK) within the multiterminal source model of Csiszar and Narayan. Building on the prior work of Tyagi for the two-terminal scenario, we derive a lower bound on the communication complexity, @math , defined to be the minimum rate of public communication needed to generate a maximal-rate SK. It is well known that the minimum rate of communication for omniscience, denoted by @math , is an upper bound on @math . For the class of pairwise independent network (PIN) models defined on uniform hypergraphs, we show that a certain Type @math condition, which is verifiable in polynomial time, guarantees that our lower bound on @math meets the @math upper bound. Thus, the PIN models satisfying our condition are @math -maximal, indicating that the upper bound @math holds with equality. This allows us to explicitly evaluate @math for such PIN models. We also give several examples of PIN models that satisfy our Type @math condition. Finally, we prove that for an arbitrary multiterminal source model, a stricter version of our Type @math condition implies that communication from all terminals (omnivocality) is needed for establishing an SK of maximum rate. For three-terminal source models, the converse is also true: omnivocality is needed for generating a maximal-rate SK only if the strict Type @math condition is satisfied. However, for the source models with four or more terminals, counterexamples exist showing that the converse does not hold in general. In the subgraph-freeness problem, we are given a constant-size graph @math , and wish to determine whether the network contains @math as a subgraph or not. The relaxation of the problem only requires us to distinguish graphs that are @math -free from graphs that are @math -far from @math -free, meaning an @math -fraction of their edges must be removed to obtain an @math -free graph. Recently, Censor-Hillel et. al. and showed that in the property-testing regime it is possible to test @math -freeness for any graph @math of size 4 in constant time, @math rounds, regardless of the network size. However, Fraigniaud et. al. also showed that their techniques for graphs @math of size 4 cannot test @math -cycle-freeness in constant time. In this paper we revisit the subgraph-freeness problem and show that @math -cycle-freeness, and indeed @math -freeness for many other graphs @math comprising more than 4 vertices, can be tested in constant time. We show that @math -freeness can be tested in @math rounds for any cycle @math , improving on the running time of @math of the previous algorithms for triangle-freeness and @math -freeness. In the special case of triangles, we show that triangle-freeness can be solved in @math rounds independently of @math , when @math is not too small with respect to the number of nodes and edges. We also show that @math -freeness for any constant-size tree @math can be tested in @math rounds, even without the property-testing relaxation. Building on these results, we define a general class of graphs for which we can test subgraph-freeness in @math rounds. This class includes all graphs over 5 vertices except the 5-clique, @math . For cliques @math over @math nodes, we show that @math -freeness can be tested in @math rounds, where @math is the number of edges. In a document network such as a citation network of scientific documents, web-logs, etc., the content produced by authors exhibits their interest in certain topics. In addition some authors influence other authors' interests. In this work, we propose to model the influence of cited authors along with the interests of citing authors. Moreover, we hypothesize that apart from the citations present in documents, the context surrounding the citation mention provides extra topical information about the cited authors. However, associating terms in the context to the cited authors remains an open problem. We propose novel document generation schemes that incorporate the context while simultaneously modeling the interests of citing authors and influence of the cited authors. Our experiments show significant improvements over baseline models for various evaluation criteria such as link prediction between document and cited author, and quantitatively explaining unseen text. We study compositions of the integer @math in which the first part, successive differences, and the last part are constrained to lie in prescribed sets @math , respectively. A simple condition on @math guarantees that the generating function @math has only a simple pole on its circle of convergence and this at @math , a function independent of @math and @math . Thus the number of compositions is asymptotic to @math for a suitable constant @math . We prove a multivariate central and local limit theorem and apply it to various statistics of random locally restricted compositions of @math , such as number of parts, numbers of parts of given sizes, and number of rises. The first and last parts are shown to have limiting distributions and to be asymptotically independent. If @math has only finitely many positive elements @math , or finitely many negative elements @math , then the largest part and number of distinct part sizes are almost surely @math . On the other hand, when both @math and @math have a positive asymptotic lower "local log-density", we prove that the largest part and number of distinct part sizes are almost surely @math , and we give sufficient conditions for the largest part to be almost surely asymptotic to @math . Abstract Documents in computer-readable form can be used to provide information about other documents, i.e. those they cite. To do this efficiently requires procedures for computer recognition of citing statements. This is not easy, especially for multi-sentence citing statements. Computer recognition procedures have been developed which are accurate to the following extent: 73 of the words in statements selected by computer procedures as being citing statements are words which are correctly attributable to the corresponding documents. The retrieval effectiveness of computer-recognized citing statements was tested in the following way. First, for eight retrieval requests in inorganiic chemistry, average recall by search of Chemical Abstracts Service indexing and Chemical Abstracts abstract text words was found to be 50 . Words from citing statements referring to the papers to be retrieved were then added to the index terms and abstract words as additional access points, and searching was repeated. Average recall increased to 70 . Only words from citing statements published within a year of the cited papers were used. The retrieval effect of citing statement words alone (published within a year) without index or abstract terms was the following: average recall was 40 . When just the words of the titles of the cited papers were added to those citing statement words, average recall increased to 50 . Let @math . We show that that the mixing time of a continuous-time Markov chain on a finite state space is about as large as the largest expected hitting time of a subset of the state space with stationary measure @math . Suitably modified results hold in discrete time and or without the reversibility assumption. The key technical tool in the proof is the construction of random set @math such that the hitting time of @math is a light-tailed stationary time for the chain. We note that essentially the same results were obtained independently by Peres and Sousi. A sensor node that is sending measurement updates regarding some physical phenomenon to a destination is considered. The sensor relies on energy harvested from nature to transmit its updates, and is equipped with a finite @math -sized battery to save its harvested energy. Energy recharges the battery incrementally in units, according to a Poisson process, and one update consumes one energy unit to reach the destination. The setting is online, where the energy arrival times are revealed causally after the energy is harvested. The goal is to update the destination in a timely manner, namely, such that the long term average age of information is minimized, subject to energy causality constraints. The age of information at a given time is defined as the time spent since the latest update has reached the destination. It is shown that the optimal update policy follows a renewal structure, where the inter-update times are independent, and the time durations between any two consecutive events of submitting an update and having @math units of energy remaining in the battery are independent and identically distributed for a given @math . The optimal renewal policy for the case of @math energy units is explicitly characterized, and it is shown that it has an energy-dependent threshold structure, where the sensor updates only if the age grows above a certain threshold that is a function of the amount of energy in its battery. We present two classes of improved estimators for mutual information @math , from samples of random points distributed according to some joint probability density @math . In contrast to conventional estimators based on binnings, they are based on entropy estimates from @math -nearest neighbor distances. This means that they are data efficient (with @math we resolve structures down to the smallest possible scales), adaptive (the resolution is higher where data are more numerous), and have minimal bias. Indeed, the bias of the underlying entropy estimates is mainly due to nonuniformity of the density at the smallest resolved scale, giving typically systematic errors which scale as functions of @math for @math points. Numerically, we find that both families become exact for independent distributions, i.e. the estimator @math vanishes (up to statistical fluctuations) if @math . This holds for all tested marginal distributions and for all dimensions of @math and @math . In addition, we give estimators for redundancies between more than two random variables. We compare our algorithms in detail with existing algorithms. Finally, we demonstrate the usefulness of our estimators for assessing the actual independence of components obtained from independent component analysis (ICA), for improving ICA, and for estimating the reliability of blind source separation. We study a Newton-like method for the minimization of an objective function @math ? that is the sum of a smooth function and an @math l1 regularization term. This method, which is sometimes referred to in the literature as a proximal Newton method, computes a step by minimizing a piecewise quadratic model @math qk of the objective function @math ?. In order to make this approach efficient in practice, it is imperative to perform this inner minimization inexactly. In this paper, we give inexactness conditions that guarantee global convergence and that can be used to control the local rate of convergence of the iteration. Our inexactness conditions are based on a semi-smooth function that represents a (continuous) measure of the optimality conditions of the problem, and that embodies the soft-thresholding iteration. We give careful consideration to the algorithm employed for the inner minimization, and report numerical results on two test sets originating in machine learning. Fourier PCA is Principal Component Analysis of a matrix obtained from higher order derivatives of the logarithm of the Fourier transform of a distribution.We make this method algorithmic by developing a tensor decomposition method for a pair of tensors sharing the same vectors in rank- @math decompositions. Our main application is the first provably polynomial-time algorithm for underdetermined ICA, i.e., learning an @math matrix @math from observations @math where @math is drawn from an unknown product distribution with arbitrary non-Gaussian components. The number of component distributions @math can be arbitrarily higher than the dimension @math and the columns of @math only need to satisfy a natural and efficiently verifiable nondegeneracy condition. As a second application, we give an alternative algorithm for learning mixtures of spherical Gaussians with linearly independent means. These results also hold in the presence of Gaussian noise. We derive the mean squared error convergence rates of kernel density-based plug-in estimators of mutual information measures between two multidimensional random variables @math and @math for two cases: 1) @math and @math are both continuous; 2) @math is continuous and @math is discrete. Using the derived rates, we propose an ensemble estimator of these information measures for the second case by taking a weighted sum of the plug-in estimators with varied bandwidths. The resulting ensemble estimator achieves the @math parametric convergence rate when the conditional densities of the continuous variables are sufficiently smooth. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first nonparametric mutual information estimator known to achieve the parametric convergence rate for this case, which frequently arises in applications (e.g. variable selection in classification). The estimator is simple to implement as it uses the solution to an offline convex optimization problem and simple plug-in estimators. A central limit theorem is also derived for the ensemble estimator. Ensemble estimators that achieve the parametric rate are also derived for the first case ( @math and @math are both continuous) and another case 3) @math and @math may have any mixture of discrete and continuous components. Group-testing refers to the problem of identifying (with high probability) a (small) subset of @math defectives from a (large) set of @math items via a “small” number of “pooled” tests (i.e., tests that have a positive outcome if at least one of the items being tested in the pool is defective, else have a negative outcome). For ease of presentation in this paper, we focus on the regime when @math for some @math . The tests may be noiseless or noisy , and the testing procedure may be adaptive (the pool defining a test may depend on the outcome of a previous test), or non-adaptive (each test is performed independent of the outcome of other tests). A rich body of the literature demonstrates that @math tests are information-theoretically necessary and sufficient for the group-testing problem, and provides algorithms that achieve this performance. However, it is only recently that reconstruction algorithms with computational complexities that are sub-linear in @math have started being investigated. In the scenario with adaptive tests with noisy outcomes, we present the first scheme that is simultaneously order-optimal (up to small constant factors) in both the number of tests and the decoding complexity ( @math in both the performance metrics). The total number of stages of our adaptive algorithm is “small” ( @math ). Similarly, in the scenario with non-adaptive tests with noisy outcomes, we present the first scheme that is simultaneously near-optimal in both the number of tests and the decoding complexity (via an algorithm that requires @math tests and has a decoding complexity of @math . Finally, we present an adaptive algorithm that only requires two stages, and for which both the number of tests and the decoding complexity scale as @math . For all three settings, the probability of error of our algorithms scales as @math . For each of the statements mentioned earlier about the order of the number of measurements, decoding complexity, and probability of error, we provide explicitly computed “small” universal factors in our theorem statements. This is the second article of a series of papers on stochastic homogenization of discrete elliptic equations. We consider a discrete elliptic equation on the @math -dimensional lattice @math with random coefficients @math of the simplest type: They are identically distributed and independent from edge to edge. On scales large w. r. t. the lattice spacing (i. e. unity), the solution operator is known to behave like the solution operator of a (continuous) elliptic equation with constant deterministic coefficients. This symmetric ''homogenized'' matrix @math is characterized by @math for any direction @math , where the random field @math (the ''corrector'') is the unique solution of @math in @math such that @math , @math is stationary and @math , @math denoting the ensemble average (or expectation). In order to approximate the homogenized coefficients @math , the corrector problem is usually solved in a box @math of size @math with periodic boundary conditions, and the space averaged energy on @math defines an approximation @math of @math . Although the statistics is modified (independence is replaced by periodic correlations) and the ensemble average is replaced by a space average, the approximation @math converges almost surely to @math as @math . In this paper, we give estimates on both errors. To be more precise, we do not consider periodic boundary conditions on a box of size @math , but replace the elliptic operator by @math with (typically) @math , as standard in the homogenization literature. We then replace the ensemble average by a space average on @math , and estimate the overall error on the homogenized coefficients in terms of @math and @math .