Spatio-temporal problems are ubiquitous and of vital importance in many research fields. Despite the potential already demonstrated by deep learning methods in modeling spatio-temporal data, typical approaches tend to focus solely on conditional expectations of the output variables being modeled. In this paper, we propose a multi-output multi-quantile deep learning approach for jointly modeling several conditional quantiles together with the conditional expectation as a way to provide a more complete "picture" of the predictive density in spatio-temporal problems. Using two large-scale datasets from the transportation domain, we empirically demonstrate that, by approaching the quantile regression problem from a multi-task learning perspective, it is possible to solve the embarrassing quantile crossings problem, while simultaneously significantly outperforming state-of-the-art quantile regression methods. Moreover, we show that jointly modeling the mean and several conditional quantiles not only provides a rich description about the predictive density that can capture heteroscedastic properties at a neglectable computational overhead, but also leads to improved predictions of the conditional expectation due to the extra information and a regularization effect induced by the added quantiles.
Direct quantile regression involves estimating a given quantile of a response variable as a function of input variables. We present a new framework for direct quantile regression where a Gaussian process model is learned, minimising the expected tilted loss function. The integration required in learning is not analytically tractable so to speed up the learning we employ the Expectation Propagation algorithm. We describe how this work relates to other quantile regression methods and apply the method on both synthetic and real data sets. The method is shown to be competitive with state of the ar…
Ground level Ozone is one of the six common air-pollutants on which the EPA has set national air quality standards. In order to capture the spatio-temporal trend of 1-hour and 8-hour average ozone concentration in the US, we develop a method for spatio-temporal simultaneous quantile regression. Unlike existing procedures, in the proposed method, smoothing across the sites is incorporated within modeling assumptions thus allowing borrowing of information across locations, an essential step when the number of samples in each location is low. The quantile function has been assumed to be linear in…
Climate change is commonly associated with an overall increase in mean temperature in a defined past time period. Many studies consider temperature trends at the global scale, but the literature is lacking in in-depth analysis of the temperature trends across Australia in recent decades. In addition to heterogeneity in mean and median values, daily Australia temperature data suffers from quasi-periodic heterogeneity in variance. However, this issue has barely been overlooked in climate research. A contribution of this article is that we propose a joint model of quantile regression and variabil…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）
This paper considers doing quantile regression on censored data using neural networks (NNs). This adds to the survival analysis toolkit by allowing direct prediction of the target variable, along with a distribution-free characterisation of uncertainty, using a flexible function approximator. We begin by showing how an algorithm popular in linear models can be applied to NNs. However, the resulting procedure is inefficient, requiring sequential optimisation of an individual NN at each desired quantile. Our major contribution is a novel algorithm that simultaneously optimises a grid of quantile…
Truncated conditional expectation functions are objects of interest in a wide range of economic applications, including income inequality measurement, financial risk management, and impact evaluation. They typically involve truncating the outcome variable above or below certain quantiles of its conditional distribution. In this paper, based on local linear methods, a novel, two-stage, nonparametric estimator of such functions is proposed. In this estimation problem, the conditional quantile function is a nuisance parameter that has to be estimated in the first stage. The proposed estimator is …
We propose a robust inferential procedure for assessing uncertainties of parameter estimation in high-dimensional linear models, where the dimension $p$ can grow exponentially fast with the sample size $n$. Our method combines the de-biasing technique with the composite quantile function to construct an estimator that is asymptotically normal. Hence it can be used to construct valid confidence intervals and conduct hypothesis tests. Our estimator is robust and does not require the existence of first or second moment of the noise distribution. It also preserves efficiency in the sense that the …
Regression modelling of spatiotemporal extreme U.S. wildfires via partially-interpretable neural networks
School of Mathematics, University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学数学学院）；Statistics Program, Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering (CEMSE) Division, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学计算机、电气与数学科学与工程（CEMSE）分部统计项目）
Conformalized Quantile Regression and Minimax Limits of Fixed-Score Calibration under Known Covariate Shift
HSE University（高等经济大学）；Lomonosov Moscow State University（罗蒙诺索夫莫斯科国立大学）；Laboratoire de Recherche d’EPITA（EPITA研究实验室）；University of Duisburg-Essen（杜伊斯堡-埃森大学）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI)（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学（MBZUAI））
We show that the estimating equations for quantile regression can be solved using a simple EM algorithm in which the M-step is computed via weighted least squares, with weights computed at the E-step as the expectation of independent generalized inverse-Gaussian variables. We compute the variance-covariance matrix for the quantile regression coefficients using a kernel density estimator that results in more stable standard errors than those produced by existing software. A natural modification of the EM algorithm that involves fitting a linear mixed model at the M-step extends the methodology …
To make inferences about the shape of a population distribution, the widely popular mean regression model, for example, is inadequate if the distribution is not approximately Gaussian (or symmetric). Compared to conventional mean regression (MR), quantile regression (QR) can characterize the entire conditional distribution of the outcome variable, and is more robust to outliers and misspecification of the error distribution. We present a likelihood-based approach to the estimation of the regression quantiles based on the asymmetric Laplace distribution (ALD), which has a hierarchical represent…
UC San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Northeastern University（东北大学）
Deep learning is gaining increasing popularity for spatiotemporal forecasting. However, prior works have mostly focused on point estimates without quantifying the uncertainty of the predictions. In high stakes domains, being able to generate probabilistic forecasts with confidence intervals is critical to risk assessment and decision making. Hence, a systematic study of uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods for spatiotemporal forecasting is missing in the community. In this paper, we describe two types of spatiotemporal forecasting problems: regular grid-based and graph-based. Then we analyz…
In this paper, we investigate the extreme-value methodology, to propose an improved estimator of the conditional tail expectation ($CTE$) for a loss distribution with a finite mean but infinite variance. The present work introduces a new estimator of the $CTE$ based on the bias-reduced estimators of high quantile for heavy-tailed distributions. The asymptotic normality of the proposed estimator is established and checked, in a simulation study. Moreover, we compare, in terms of bias and mean squared error, our estimator with the known old estimator.
Many traffic prediction applications rely on uncertainty estimates instead of the mean prediction. Statistical traffic prediction literature has a complete subfield devoted to uncertainty modelling, but recent deep learning traffic prediction models either lack this feature or make specific assumptions that restrict its practicality. We propose Quantile Graph Wavenet, a Spatio-Temporal neural network that is trained to estimate a density given the measurements of previous timesteps, conditioned on a quantile. Our method of density estimation is fully parameterised by our neural network and doe…
With continuous outcomes, the average causal effect is typically defined using a contrast of expected potential outcomes. However, in the presence of skewed outcome data, the expectation may no longer be meaningful. In practice the typical approach is to either "ignore or transform" - ignore the skewness altogether or transform the outcome to obtain a more symmetric distribution, although neither approach is entirely satisfactory. Alternatively the causal effect can be redefined as a contrast of median potential outcomes, yet discussion of confounding-adjustment methods to estimate this parame…
SEMF: Supervised Expectation-Maximization Framework for Predicting Intervals
HEC, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland（洛桑大学HEC学院，洛桑，瑞士）；HEC, University of Lausanne, Expertise Center for Climate Extremes (ECCE), Lausanne, Switzerland（洛桑大学HEC学院，洛桑，瑞士）
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院（KIT））
Given a set of empirical observations, conditional density estimation aims to capture the statistical relationship between a conditional variable $\mathbf{x}$ and a dependent variable $\mathbf{y}$ by modeling their conditional probability $p(\mathbf{y}|\mathbf{x})$. The paper develops best practices for conditional density estimation for finance applications with neural networks, grounded on mathematical insights and empirical evaluations. In particular, we introduce a noise regularization and data normalization scheme, alleviating problems with over-fitting, initialization and hyper-parameter…
Bayesian optimisation (BO) is widely used to optimise stochastic black box functions. While most BO approaches focus on optimising conditional expectations, many applications require risk-averse strategies and alternative criteria accounting for the distribution tails need to be considered. In this paper, we propose new variational models for Bayesian quantile and expectile regression that are well-suited for heteroscedastic noise settings. Our models consist of two latent Gaussian processes accounting respectively for the conditional quantile (or expectile) and the scale parameter of an asymm…
Purdue University（普渡大学）；North Carolina State University（北卡罗来纳州立大学）
Estimating parameters of mixture model has wide applications ranging from classification problems to estimating of complex distributions. Most of the current literature on estimating the parameters of the mixture densities are based on iterative Expectation Maximization (EM) type algorithms which require the use of either taking expectations over the latent label variables or generating samples from the conditional distribution of such latent labels using the Bayes rule. Moreover, when the number of components is unknown, the problem becomes computationally more demanding due to well-known lab…
Distributional Off-Policy Evaluation with Deep Quantile Process Regression
School of Statistics and Data Science, and Philosophy and Social Sciences Laboratory of Data Science in Finance and Economics at the Ministry of Education, Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics（统计学与数据科学学院，暨教育部金融与经济数据科学与社会科学实验室，江西财经大学）；School of Statistics and Data Science, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics（统计学与数据科学学院，上海财经大学）；School of Artificial Intelligence, and Hubei Key Laboratory of Computational Science, Wuhan University（人工智能学院，湖北省计算科学重点实验室，武汉大学）
Evaluating Dynamic Conditional Quantile Treatment Effects with Applications in Ridesharing
DiDi Chuxing（滴滴出行）；University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；Shanghai University of Finance and Economics（上海财经大学）；London School of Economics and Political Science（伦敦政治经济学院）
We are interested in solving the multiple measurement vector (MMV) problem for instances, where the underlying sparsity pattern exhibit spatio-temporal structure motivated by the electroencephalogram (EEG) source localization problem. We propose a probabilistic model that takes this structure into account by generalizing the structured spike and slab prior and the associated Expectation Propagation inference scheme. Based on numerical experiments, we demonstrate the viability of the model and the approximate inference scheme.
University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
This paper introduces a new sparse spatio-temporal structured Gaussian process regression framework for online and offline Bayesian inference. This is the first framework that gives a time-evolving representation of the interdependencies between the components of the sparse signal of interest. A hierarchical Gaussian process describes such structure and the interdependencies are represented via the covariance matrices of the prior distributions. The inference is based on the expectation propagation method and the theoretical derivation of the posterior distribution is provided in the paper. Th…
Aalto University（阿尔托大学）；Technical University of Denmark（丹麦技术大学）
We formulate approximate Bayesian inference in non-conjugate temporal and spatio-temporal Gaussian process models as a simple parameter update rule applied during Kalman smoothing. This viewpoint encompasses most inference schemes, including expectation propagation (EP), the classical (Extended, Unscented, etc.) Kalman smoothers, and variational inference. We provide a unifying perspective on these algorithms, showing how replacing the power EP moment matching step with linearisation recovers the classical smoothers. EP provides some benefits over the traditional methods via introduction of th…
Spatio-temporal point process models play a central role in the analysis of spatially distributed systems in several disciplines. Yet, scalable inference remains computa- tionally challenging both due to the high resolution modelling generally required and the analytically intractable likelihood function. Here, we exploit the sparsity structure typical of (spatially) discretised log-Gaussian Cox process models by using approximate message-passing algorithms. The proposed algorithms scale well with the state dimension and the length of the temporal horizon with moderate loss in distributional a…
In this work, we address the problem of solving a series of underdetermined linear inverse problems subject to a sparsity constraint. We generalize the spike-and-slab prior distribution to encode a priori correlation of the support of the solution in both space and time by imposing a transformed Gaussian process on the spike-and-slab probabilities. An expectation propagation (EP) algorithm for posterior inference under the proposed model is derived. For large scale problems, the standard EP algorithm can be prohibitively slow. We therefore introduce three different approximation schemes to red…
In this paper a new Bayesian model for sparse linear regression with a spatio-temporal structure is proposed. It incorporates the structural assumptions based on a hierarchical Gaussian process prior for spike and slab coefficients. We design an inference algorithm based on Expectation Propagation and evaluate the model over the real data.
