Abstract: We consider sequential prediction with expert advice when data are generated from distributions varying arbitrarily within an unknown constraint set. We quantify relaxations of the classical i.i.d. assumption in terms of these constraint sets, with i.i.d. sequences at one extreme and adversarial mechanisms at the other. The Hedge algorithm, long known to be minimax optimal in the adversarial regime, was recently shown to be minimax optimal for i.i.d. data. We show that Hedge with deterministic learning rates is suboptimal…

Abstract: Mainstream machine learning, despite its recent successes, has a serious drawback: while its state-of-the-art algorithms often produce excellent predictions, they do not provide measures of their accuracy and reliability that would be both practically useful and provably valid. Conformal prediction adapts rank tests, popular in nonparametric statistics, to testing the IID assumption (the observations being independent and identically distributed). This gives us practical measures, provably valid under the IID assumption, of the accuracy and reliability of predictions produced by…

Abstract: The magnitude of the weights of a neural network is a fundamental measure of complexity that plays a crucial role in the study of implicit and explicit regularization. For example, in recent work, gradient descent updates in overparameterized models asymptotically lead to solutions that implicitly minimize the ell_2 norm of the parameters of the model, resulting in an inductive bias that is highly architecture dependent. To investigate the properties of learned functions, it is natural to consider a function…

Abstract:  Sequential Multiple Assignment Randomized Trials (SMARTs) are considered the gold standard for estimation and evaluation of treatment regimes. SMARTs are typically sized to ensure sufficient power for a simple comparison, e.g., the comparison of two fixed treatment sequences. Estimation of an optimal treatment regime is conducted as part of a secondary and hypothesis-generating analysis with formal evaluation of the estimated optimal regime deferred to a follow-up trial. However, running a follow-up trial to evaluate an estimated optimal treatment regime…

Abstract: Prioritizing likely causal genes from genome-wide association studies (GWAS) is a fundamental problem. There are many methods for GWAS gene prioritization, including methods that map candidate SNPs to their target genes and methods that leverage patterns of enrichment from across the genome. In this talk, I will introduce a new method for leveraging genome-wide patterns of enrichment to prioritize genes at GWAS loci, incorporating information about genes from many sources. I will then discuss the problem of benchmarking gene prioritization methods,…