Statistics Theory · Cross-listed from eess.SP
Beyond the Flat-Spike: Adaptive Sparse CCA for Decaying and Unbalanced Signals
Mengchu Xu, Jian Wang and Yonina C. Eldar
Sparse Canonical Correlation Analysis (SCCA) is a fundamental statistical tool for identifying linear relationships in high-dimensional, multi-view data. While minimax theory establishes an optimal sample complexity scaling additively with the sparsity levels of the canonical vectors, computationally efficient
algorithms typically suffer from a suboptimal multiplicative dependence. This computational-statistical gap is intrinsically tied to worst-case “flat” signal assumptions. In practice, however, multi-view signals frequently exhibit structured energy concentration, such as a power-law decay. To exploit this structural concentration and bypass the worst-case bottleneck, we propose Bilateral Spectral Energy Pursuit (Bi-SEP). Operating directly on the cross-covariance
matrix, Bi-SEP is a stagewise adaptive
algorithm that utilizes a proxy refinement step to dynamically track and capture cross-view signal energy. Theoretically, we establish a profile-adaptive sample complexity bound governed by the coupled energy profiles of the two views. Notably, under power-law decay models, we reveal a synergistic phase transition: the optimal linear sample complexity is attainable provided that the aggregate decay rate of the two views is sufficiently large. This result demonstrates that a highly concentrated signal in one view allows the model to accommodate a completely flat signal in its partner. Numerical experiments validate our theoretical findings, illustrating the advantages of Bi-SEP in structured, non-flat signal regimes.
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Machine Learning (Statistics) · Cross-listed from cs.LG
Non-Stationarity in the Embedding Space of Time Series Foundation Models
Jinmyeong Choi, Brad Shook and Artur Dubrawski
Time series foundation models (TSFMs) are widely used as generic feature extractors, yet the notion of non-stationarity in their
embedding spaces remains poorly understood. Recent work often conflates non-stationarity with distribution shift, blurring distinctions fundamental to classical time-series analysis and long-standing methodologies such as statistical process control (SPC). In SPC, non-stationarity signals a process leaving a stable regime - via shifts in mean, variance, or emerging trends - and detecting such departures is central to quality monitoring and change-point analysis. Motivated by this diagnostic tradition, we study how different forms of distributional non-stationarity - mean shifts, variance changes, and linear trends - become linearly accessible in TSFM
embedding spaces under controlled conditions. We further examine temporal non-stationarity arising from persistence, which reflects violations of weak stationarity due to long-
memory or near-unit-root behavior rather than explicit distributional shifts. By sweeping shift strength and probing multiple TSFMs, we find that
embedding-space detectability of non-stationarity degrades smoothly and that different models exhibit distinct, model-specific failure modes.
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Statistics Applications · Cross-listed from cs.AI
Toward Reducing Unproductive Container Moves: Predicting Service Requirements and Dwell Times
Elena Villalobos, Adolfo De Unánue T., Fernanda Sobrino et al. (+4 more)
This article presents the results of a data science study conducted at a container terminal, aimed at reducing unproductive container moves through the prediction of service requirements and container dwell times. We develop and evaluate machine learning models that leverage historical operational data to anticipate which containers will require pre-clearance handling services prior to cargo release and to estimate how long they are expected to remain in the terminal. As part of the data preparation process, we implement a classification system for cargo descriptions and perform deduplication of consignee records to improve data consistency and feature quality. These predictive capabilities provide valuable inputs for strategic planning and resource allocation in yard operations. Across multiple temporal validation periods, the proposed models consistently outperform existing rule-based heuristics and random baselines in precision and recall. These results demonstrate the practical value of predictive analytics for improving operational efficiency and supporting data-driven decision-making in container terminal logistics.
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All authors Elena Villalobos, Adolfo De Unánue T., Fernanda Sobrino, David Aké, Stephany Cisneros, Jorge Lecona, Alejandra Matadamaz
Statistics Theory
Information Geometry and Asymptotic Theory for SMML Estimators
Enes Makalic and Daniel F. Schmidt
Strict minimum message length (SMML) is an information-theoretic coding principle that represents a continuous statistical model by a finite set of assertions and a partition of the sample space. We show that the SMML objective decomposes into assertion
entropy and conditional cross-
entropy, balancing the cost of identifying an assertion against the cost of encoding data under the assigned model. For any fixed partition, the optimal codepoint for each
cell is the model distribution that minimises Kullback-Leibler divergence from the data distribution restricted to that
cell. Using the local Fisher-Rao geometry of regular parametric models, we show that, under high-resolution regularity conditions, optimal SMML partitions are asymptotically the pullback, through the maximum likelihood
estimator, of weighted Fisher-Rao Voronoi tessellations in parameter space, with assertion probabilities appearing as additive weights. For regular exponential families, SMML codepoints satisfy a moment-matching condition and admit an interpretation as KL/Bregman centroids, while exact SMML
cells are pullbacks of convex polyhedra in sufficient-statistic space. Together, these results show that SMML induces a natural information-
geometric quantisation linking
entropy-based coding, KL projection, and divergence-based Voronoi geometry.
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Statistical Computation
fastml: Guarded Resampling Workflows for Safer Automated Machine Learning in R
Selcuk Korkmaz, Dincer Goksuluk and Eda Karaismailoglu
Preprocessing leakage arises when scaling, imputation, or other data-dependent transformations are estimated before resampling, inflating apparent performance while remaining hard to detect. We present fastml, an R package that provides a single-call interface for leakage-aware machine learning through guarded resampling, where preprocessing is re-estimated inside each resample and applied to the corresponding assessment data. The package supports grouped and time-ordered resampling, blocks high-risk configurations, audits recipes for external dependencies, and includes sandboxed execution and integrated model explanation. We evaluate fastml with a Monte Carlo simulation contrasting global and fold-local normalization, a usability comparison with tidymodels under matched specifications, and survival
benchmarks across
datasets of different sizes. The simulation demonstrates that global preprocessing substantially inflates apparent performance relative to guarded resampling. fastml matched held-out performance obtained with tidymodels while reducing workflow orchestration, and it supported consistent benchmarking of multiple survival model classes through a unified interface.
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Statistical Methodology · Cross-listed from physics.soc-ph
Ratio of Quantiles Indicates Burstiness with Fewer False Negatives than the Conventional Burstiness Parameter
Joshua Z. Stadlan, Michelle Birkett and Jason H. Rife
Complexity researchers view burstiness–fluctuating levels of activity–as evidence of hidden interactions within the system generating the activity signal. Yet, current burstiness metrics miss evidence of burstiness in some moderately bursty distributions and under moderate sampling conditions. The canonical Burstiness Parameter (BP) compares distributions of timing statistics to the exponential distribution, representing the timing of independent random events, but it provides false negatives for some parameter ranges of power laws, with and without cut-offs. We introduce a metric that maintains BP's measurement approach but reduces false negatives: the Burstiness Tail-based Index (BTI). Based on ratios of differences in
quantiles, BTI correctly classifies bursty distributions over certain parameter ranges misclassified by BP. Additionally, we find BTI to be more robust than BP in the presence of limited sample sizes and short observation windows, using simulated samples drawn from distributions correctly classified by BP in their analytical form. As a case study, we revisit an analysis of human activity data and find that the choice of BTI over BP influences interpretations of the timescales of burstiness in the
dataset. Given these analytical, simulated, and empirical results, we argue for BTI's practical advantage over BP in assessing burstiness in real-world temporal signals for complexity research and time series modeling.
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Statistics Theory
Robust mean estimation under star-shaped constraints with heavy-tailed noise
Tuorui Peng, Akshay Prasadan and Matey Neykov
We study the problem of robust mean estimation with adversarially contaminated data under
star-shaped constraints in a heavy-tailed noise setting, where only a finite second moment $ \sigma ^2 $ is assumed. For a contamination level $ \varepsilon$ below some constant, we show that the minimax rate of the squared $ \ell_2 $ loss is $ \max( \delta ^{*2}, \varepsilon \sigma ^2) \wedge d^2 $ for a
star-shaped set with diameter $ d $ (set $d = \infty$ if the set is unbounded), with $ \delta ^* $ determined via the local
entropy $ \log M^\mathrm{ loc }(\delta ,c) $ as \begin{align*} \delta ^*:= \sup\bigg\{\delta \geq 0: N\frac{\delta ^2}{\sigma ^2}\leq \log M^\mathrm{ loc }(\delta ,c) \bigg\}, \end{align*} where $ c $ is a sufficiently large constant. Crucially, we require that the sample size satisfies $N \gtrsim \mathop{ \sup }\limits_{\delta \geq 0} \log M^\mathrm{ loc }(\delta ,c)$. We also show that the minimax rate is $ \max(\delta^{*2},\varepsilon ^2\sigma ^2) \wedge d^2 $ for known or sign-symmetric distributions, matching the rate achieved in the Gaussian case.
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Machine Learning (Statistics) · Cross-listed from cs.LG
Blind-Spot Mass: A Good-Turing Framework for Quantifying Deployment Coverage Risk in Machine Learning Systems
Biplab Pal, Santanu Bhattacharya and Madanjit Singh
Blind-spot mass is a Good-Turing framework for quantifying deployment coverage risk in machine learning. In modern ML systems, operational state distributions are often heavy-tailed, implying that a long tail of valid but rare states is structurally under-supported in finite training and evaluation data. This creates a form of 'coverage blindness': models can appear accurate on standard test sets yet remain unreliable across large regions of the deployment state space. We propose blind-spot mass B_n(tau), a deployment metric estimating the total probability mass assigned to states whose empirical support falls below a threshold tau. B_n(tau) is computed using Good-Turing unseen-species estimation and yields a principled estimate of how much of the operational distribution lies in reliability-critical, under-supported regimes. We further derive a coverage-imposed accuracy ceiling, decomposing overall performance into supported and blind components and separating capacity limits from data limits. We validate the framework in wearable human activity recognition (HAR) using wrist-worn inertial data. We then replicate the same analysis in the MIMIC-IV hospital database with 275 admissions, where the blind-spot mass curve converges to the same 95% at tau = 5 across clinical state abstractions. This replication across structurally independent domains - differing in modality, feature space, label space, and application - shows that blind-spot mass is a general ML methodology for quantifying combinatorial coverage risk, not an application-specific artifact. Blind-spot decomposition identifies which activities or clinical regimes dominate risk, providing actionable guidance for industrial practitioners on targeted data collection, normalization/renormalization, and physics- or domain-informed constraints for safer deployment.
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Statistical Methodology
Hypothesis Testing for Penalized Estimating Equations with Cross-Fitted Covariance Calibration
Jing Zhou and Zhe Zhang
We study hypothesis testing for penalized
estimators in settings where the full marginal distribution of a multivariate response is difficult to specify, such as longitudinal data with correlated measurements or high-dimensional heteroscedastic regression. Assuming that the conditional mean model is correctly specified, we establish that the penalized estimating equations admit a $\sqrt{n}$-consistent solution, even when the working covariance structure is misspecified. Our inferential target is a low-dimensional subvector of parameters associated with the mean model. We show that the resulting test statistic converges to a $\chi^2$ distribution, and that its asymptotic power depends on the nuisance covariance function. To mitigate this dependence, we propose estimating the covariance function via cross-fitting, which provides a calibrated and robust procedure for inference.
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Machine Learning (Statistics) · Cross-listed from cs.LG
PCA-Driven Adaptive Sensor Triage for Edge AI Inference
Ankit Hemant Lade, Sai Krishna Jasti, Nikhil Sinha et al. (+2 more)
Multi-channel sensor networks in industrial IoT often exceed available bandwidth. We propose PCA-Triage, a streaming
algorithm that converts incremental PCA loadings into proportional per-channel sampling rates under a bandwidth budget. PCA-Triage runs in O(wdk) time with zero trainable parameters (0.67 ms per decision). We evaluate on 7
benchmarks (8–82 channels) against 9 baselines. PCA-Triage is the best unsupervised method on 3 of 6
datasets at 50% bandwidth, winning 5 of 6 against every baseline with large effect sizes (r = 0.71–0.91). On TEP, it achieves F1 = 0.961 +/- 0.001 – within 0.1% of full-data performance – while maintaining F1 > 0.90 at 30% budget. Targeted extensions push F1 to 0.970. The
algorithm is robust to packet loss and sensor noise (3.7–4.8% degradation under combined worst-case).
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All authors Ankit Hemant Lade, Sai Krishna Jasti, Nikhil Sinha, Indar Kumar, Akanksha Tiwari
Machine Learning (Statistics)
Generative Path-Law Jump-Diffusion: Sequential MMD-Gradient Flows and Generalisation Bounds in Marcus-Signature RKHS
Daniel Bloch
This paper introduces a novel generative framework for synthesising forward-looking, càdlàg
stochastic trajectories that are sequentially consistent with time-evolving path-law proxies, thereby incorporating anticipated structural breaks, regime shifts, and non-autonomous dynamics. By framing path synthesis as a sequential matching problem on restricted Skorokhod
manifolds, we develop the Anticipatory Neural Jump-
Diffusion (ANJD) flow, a generative mechanism that effectively inverts the time-extended Marcus-sense signature. Central to this approach is the Anticipatory Variance-Normalised Signature Geometry (AVNSG), a time-evolving precision operator that performs dynamic spectral whitening on the signature
manifold to ensure contractivity during volatile regime shifts and discrete aleatoric shocks. We provide a rigorous theoretical analysis demonstrating that the joint generative flow constitutes an infinitesimal steepest descent direction for the Maximum Mean Discrepancy functional relative to a moving target proxy. Furthermore, we establish statistical generalisation bounds within the restricted path-space and analyse the Rademacher complexity of the whitened signature functionals to characterise the expressive power of the model under heavy-tailed innovations. The framework is implemented via a scalable numerical scheme involving Nyström-compressed score-matching and an anticipatory hybrid Euler-Maruyama-Marcus integration scheme. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method captures the non-commutative moments and high-order
stochastic texture of complex, discontinuous path-laws with high computational efficiency.
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Machine Learning (Statistics) · Cross-listed from math.OC
Muon Dynamics as a Spectral Wasserstein Flow
Gabriel Peyré
Gradient normalization can stabilize deep-learning optimization, and spectral normalizations are especially natural for
matrix-shaped parameter blocks;
Muon is the motivating example. We study an idealized deterministic, continuous-time, vanishing-momentum version of this idea in the mean-field regime, where wide models are represented by probability measures on parameter space. Starting from normalized
matrix flows, we introduce Spectral Wasserstein distances indexed by norms $\gamma$ on positive semidefinite
matrices: the trace norm recovers the classical $W_2$ distance, the operator norm gives the
Muon geometry, and Schatten norms interpolate between them. We develop a static Kantorovich formulation, a max–min robust-cost representation, and Gaussian reductions extending the Bures formula. For monotone norms, we prove equivalence with a Benamou–Brenier formulation and obtain a gradient-flow interpretation of normalized mean-field training dynamics. Numerical experiments illustrate the resulting flows for MMD objectives, Gaussian reductions, two-layer ReLU models, and shallow
attention.
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Machine Learning (Statistics) · Cross-listed from cs.LG
Noise Immunity in In-Context Tabular Learning: An Empirical Robustness Analysis of TabPFN's Attention Mechanisms
James Hu and Mahdi Ghelichi
Tabular foundation models (TFMs) such as TabPFN (Tabular Prior-Data Fitted Network) are designed to generalize across heterogeneous tabular
datasets through in-context learning (ICL). They perform prediction in a single forward pass conditioned on labeled examples without
dataset-specific parameter updates. This paradigm is particularly attractive in industrial domains (e.g., finance and healthcare) where tabular prediction is pervasive. Retraining a bespoke model for each new table can be costly or infeasible in these settings, while data quality issues such as irrelevant predictors, correlated feature groups, and label noise are common. In this paper, we provide strong empirical evidence that TabPFN is highly robust under these sub-optimal conditions. We study TabPFN and its
attention mechanisms for binary classification problems with controlled synthetic perturbations that vary: (i)
dataset width by injecting random uncorrelated features and by introducing nonlinearly correlated features, (ii)
dataset size by increasing the number of training rows, and (iii) label quality by increasing the fraction of mislabeled targets. Beyond predictive performance, we analyze internal signals including
attention concentration and
attention-based feature ranking metrics. Across these parametric tests, TabPFN is remarkably resilient: ROC-AUC remains high,
attention stays structured and sharp, and informative features are highly ranked by
attention-based metrics. Qualitative visualizations with
attention heatmaps, feature-
token embeddings, and SHAP plots further support a consistent pattern across layers in which TabPFN increasingly concentrates on useful features while separating their signals from noise. Together, these findings suggest that TabPFN is a robust TFM capable of maintaining both predictive performance and coherent internal behavior under various scenarios of data imperfections.
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Statistical Methodology
A Robust SINDy Autoencoder for Noisy Dynamical System Identification
Kairui Ding
Sparse identification of nonlinear dynamics (SINDy) has been widely used to discover the governing equations of a dynamical system from data. It uses sparse regression techniques to identify parsimonious models of unknown systems from a library of candidate functions. Therefore, it relies on the assumption that the dynamics are sparsely represented in the coordinate system used. To address this limitation, one seeks a coordinate transformation that provides reduced coordinates capable of reconstructing the original system. Recently, SINDy autoencoders have extended this idea by combining sparse model discovery with autoencoder architectures to learn simplified latent coordinates together with parsimonious governing equations. A central challenge in this framework is robustness to measurement error. Inspired by noise-separating neural network structures, we incorporate a noise-separation module into the SINDy autoencoder architecture, thereby improving robustness and enabling more reliable identification of noisy dynamical systems. Numerical experiments on the Lorenz system show that the proposed method recovers interpretable latent dynamics and accurately estimates the measurement noise from noisy observations.
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