Statistics Applications · Cross-listed from cs.CL
Predicting consumer-technology ownership without a diffusion history
Irina Vartanova, Niels Selling, Jennifer Viberg Johansson et al. (+1 more)
We test whether the perceived attributes of a consumer technology predict how widely it is owned. In a 2022 Prolific survey of US adults (n = 678), respondents rated 65 consumer technologies on six attributes. We then elicited the same ratings from two frontier
language models, Anthropic Claude Opus 4.7 and OpenAI GPT-5.5. We regress ownership prevalence on four UTAUT2 acceptance attributes plus a log-age
covariate with a sign-constrained penalized regression and evaluate it by holding out one technology at a time. The attribute model improves on a baseline of years-since-launch: mean absolute error falls by 17% with the human ratings, and by more with either model, most with Opus 4.7. Over the short 2022-to-2025 window, where ownership moved little, the same attributes do not improve on a no-change baseline. We set out the limitations of the approach, including the possibility that
language-model ratings reflect prior knowledge of these technologies rather than independent attribute
reasoning. We include a deployment illustration: 2027 ownership predictions for eleven products launched in 2025 and 2026.
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All authors Irina Vartanova, Niels Selling, Jennifer Viberg Johansson, Pontus Strimling
Statistics Theory · Cross-listed from q-fin.ST
Marginally Useful: An Information-Gap Identity in Conformal Prediction
Peter Cotton
Conformal prediction has been touted as a more formal, rigorous approach to adding uncertainty to a forecast. The sole objective of this note is to point out that rigor cuts both ways in the case of residual pooling, the technique used in the vast majority of conformal prediction applications. The fact that unconditional guarantee of coverage is provided is not in question, but we make clear, we believe for the first time, that there is an opposing guarantee too: a permanent gambit of logarithmic-score regret which no amount of data or tuning can subsequently reduce. We give the exact size of the sacrifice, and a financial reading of it as the growth rate of an oracle adversary betting against odds set by someone using residual pooling.
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Statistics Theory · Cross-listed from cs.AI
Hypothesis-Disciplined Multi-Agent Automated Formalization of Asymptotic Statistical Theory
Tingzhou Wei, Zeyu Zheng, Ethan X. Fang et al. (+1 more)
Asymptotic statistical theory is a challenging domain for AI-assisted formalization: its central results mix convergence statements, asymptotic expansions, functional analysis, and regularity conditions that have a large gap from existing infrastructure in Lean 4 formalization. To address these challenges, we propose a hypothesis-disciplined Lean 4 formalization pipeline built from multiple
agents: a manager that coordinates seven specialist roles for proof planning, skeleton scaffolding, Mathlib reconnaissance, proof construction, integration, independent review, and audit. The main methodological discipline is the hypothesis-disciplined audit, implemented by the Auditor
agent: every main-
theorem hypothesis and concept-layer field must be anchored in the source mathematical prose, justified as a Lean encoding adapter, marked as source-implied, or rejected as an unsupported strengthening. Using this workflow, we build a systematic formalization of asymptotic statistical theory, especially the parametric and semi-parametric models' asymptotic distribution and efficiency results. The resulting Lean development is axiom-clean and source-faithful, with Lean-checked and human-audited proofs of core parametric and semi-parametric
theorems organized so that
theorem-agnostic infrastructure and statistical concept definitions are separated from
theorem-specific assembly. The formalization results are available at https://github.com/junwei-lu/Lean-Asymptotic-Statistical-Theory.
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All authors Tingzhou Wei, Zeyu Zheng, Ethan X. Fang, Junwei Lu
Statistical Computation
Delayed acceptance sampling with Hamiltonian proposal subchains for random field materials inference
Simona Bérešová, Michal Béreš, Tomáš Luber et al. (+1 more)
This paper focuses on accelerating Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling in
Bayesian inverse problems in which forward model evaluations dominate the computational cost. It builds on several established ingredients previously used in related scenarios: delayed acceptance, neural network surrogate models,
Hamiltonian proposals, and proposal subchains. The main framework is the delayed-acceptance Metropolis-Hastings
algorithm of Christen and Fox (2005). The first-stage proposal distribution is constructed from a subchain of
Hamiltonian trajectories targeting the surrogate posterior. For each fixed surrogate model, the
Hamiltonian subchain and delayed-acceptance correction define a kernel invariant with respect to the exact posterior. In the present work, the surrogate is updated only during a burn-in phase, after which the production run uses a fixed surrogate model. The sampling framework is implemented in Python using parallel processes. Several chains are generated in parallel and share a single surrogate model trained during burn-in on all collected data. The forward model is treated as a black box; therefore, the application area is broad. However, the main motivation is efficient solution of geotechnical inverse problems with material properties represented by Gaussian random fields. In this study, the sampling framework is applied to a geotechnical inverse problem in which hydraulic conductivity and porosity are modeled as non-stationary Gaussian random fields approximated using truncated Karhunen-Loeve expansions. Based on a precomputation, the truncation dimensions are chosen separately for hydraulic conductivity and porosity. The forward model outputs are pore pressure values at control points and selected observation times. These are compared with in situ pore pressure measurements collected over one year during the Tunnel Sealing Experiment in an underground laboratory in Canada.
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All authors Simona Bérešová, Michal Béreš, Tomáš Luber, Stanislav Sysala
Statistical Methodology · Cross-listed from cs.LG
LMT: A Bayesian Framework for Causal Discovery from Textual Alarm Records in Manufacturing Systems
Xiaofeng Xiao, Jianhong Chen, Qiuzhuang Sun et al. (+2 more)
Textual event records, such as alarm logs, have become an increasingly common data source in engineering and manufacturing systems. Beyond identifying correlations or recurring patterns, engineers are often interested in understanding which types of events causally trigger or influence other events during system operation. Textual event descriptions may contain semantic clues about such causal relationships, and recent large
language models (LLMs) provide a promising tool for extracting these signals. However, relying solely on LLM-encoded textual information is insufficient for accurate causal discovery, since semantic patterns do not directly reveal causal mechanisms and may confuse causation with correlation or frequent sequential patterns. To address these challenges, we propose LMT, a
Bayesian causal discovery framework for engineering event data that jointly leverages textual descriptions and timestamps. Specifically, LMT first uses LLMs to extract semantic causal signals from event descriptions and constructs a prior distribution over causal graphs among event types or event clusters. It then incorporates temporal evidence through a Poisson-process-based likelihood, allowing the LLM-informed prior to be refined by timestamp-based statistical evidence. By integrating the textual and temporal information, LMT produces a causal graph that is both interpretable and data-supported. Simulation studies show that the proposed framework is effective across different settings and is especially advantageous in small-sample alarm-event scenarios.
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All authors Xiaofeng Xiao, Jianhong Chen, Qiuzhuang Sun, Naichen Shi, Xubo Yue
Machine Learning (Statistics) · Cross-listed from cs.LG
TENP: Trapezoidal Expert Neuron Pruning For Mixture-of-Experts
Jiangyang He, Shaolin Zhu and Deyi Xiong
Mixture-of-Experts large
language models (LLMs) scale efficiently through sparse activation, yet their deployment is fundamentally constrained by the large static parameter footprint of experts. Existing compression approaches either remove entire experts, disrupting routing
topology and harming performance, or rely on unstructured weight
pruning with limited practical efficiency. To address the limitations, we propose TENP, a structured Trapezoidal ExpertNeuron
Pruning framework. Using a few samples, we identify and retain important experts, while applying expert
neuron pruning (ENP) to less important experts, reserving model parameters in a trapezoidal pattern from shallow to deep layers. When evaluating expert importance, we jointly consider both the magnitude of the expert output and its ability to change the direction of the input vector. For ENP, we measure each
neuron's projected contribution to the expert output to identify and retain important
neurons. We conduct extensive experiments on the Qwen and DeepSeek models. Under a routing expert sparsity of 40% and an average of 63.76% activated expert parameters, the DeepSeek model suffers only a 1-point drop in accuracy compared to the full-parameter model. Moreover, it outperforms the full-parameter model by 10% on code generation tasks.
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Machine Learning (Statistics)
Sparse Functional Singular Value Decomposition for Biclustering and Triclustering Longitudinal Data
Yue Zhao, Thierry Chekouo and Sandra Safo
Identifying subtypes of complex conditions, such as Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), often requires capturing latent patterns in longitudinal omics data. However, these data are typically high-dimensional, sparsely sampled, and irregularly observed over time, posing substantial challenges for conventional (bi)clustering and functional data analysis methods. We propose Tri-SfSVD, a unified sparse functional Singular Value Decomposition framework for discovering biclusters and triclusters in longitudinal data. Unlike existing functional biclustering methods that rely on ad hoc imputation or enforce restrictive shape-homogeneity assumptions, Tri-SfSVD integrates continuous trajectory estimation with simultaneous subject, feature, and temporal selection within a single optimization framework. By imposing sparse penalties across subjects, variables, and temporal subregions, the proposed method works directly on observed data to uncover localized structures at the subject, subject-feature, and subject-feature-time levels. Extensive simulations demonstrate that Tri-SfSVD outperforms existing approaches in high-dimensional settings. Applied to IBD multi-omics data, the method identified three biclusters linking sample clusters with distinct IBD-related clinical characteristics to microbial pathway groups associated with specific bacterial taxa, providing interpretable subject-pathway associations for characterizing disease heterogeneity. Applied to multi-channel
EEG data, the method identified three triclusters linking sample clusters with distinct alcohol-related phenotypes to localized
brain activity patterns, including subgroup differences separated by temporal subregions within the same spatial region.
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Statistical Computation · Cross-listed from math.DS
A Two-Channel F-Transform Representation for Early Trajectory Characterization in Iterated Correlation Dynamics
Ishrak Alhajj Hassan
Many nonlinear iterative systems generate high-dimensional trajectories whose early behavior is informative but difficult to compare directly. This paper derives a fixed-dimensional F-transform coordinate representation for early trajectories of iterated Pearson correlation
matrices. The construction is defined on the first five-point post-transient signal window, which is the shortest sampled window that simultaneously places the three symmetric fuzzy nodes at observed positions and supports a nondegenerate centered first-degree F-transform coefficient, thereby providing the earliest feasible local level–trend characterization within this sampled geometry. The representation combines two logarithmic observables of the post-transient dynamics: step size and contraction ratio. Applying this same four-coordinate construction to the step-size and contraction-ratio signals yields the eight-dimensional descriptor $\Psi=(v_1,v_2,v_3,s_2,u_1,u_2,u_3,r_2)$, with a common coordinate form across
matrix sizes. For the fixed construction, $\Psi=M(q_2,\ldots,q_7)^{\top}$, $q_k=\log\delta_k$, with $\operatorname{rank}M=6$. Thus, the descriptor is an injective, overcomplete representation of the six logged step sizes underlying the two channels. The representation is Lipschitz stable, and the centered first-degree coefficient recovers affine trends exactly. Convergence-length approximation is used as a downstream test of retained dynamical information. Across 22
matrix dimensions and 22,000 trajectories, repeated train–test evaluation shows predictive performance comparable to raw two-channel and statistical-summary representations. PCA shows that the first two principal components explain on average $84.47\%$ of the descriptor variance. Clustering reveals reproducible coarse organization, with the strongest mean silhouette at $k=2$ and high stability for smaller numbers of clusters.
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Statistics Applications
Eigenvector Spatial Filters Nuclear Norm Matrix Completion with Application to Air Quality Data
Rodolfo Metulini
Reliable reconstruction of missing observations in environmental panel
datasets is essential for accurate exposure assessment and policy analysis. Traditional
nuclear norm
matrix completion methods effectively impute missing entries in low-rank
matrices, yet often overlook the spatial dependence inherent to air quality processes. This paper introduces the Eigenvector Spatial Filters
Nuclear Norm
Matrix Completion (ESFNNMC) method, an extension of
nuclear norm fixed-effects
matrix completion that replaces unit-specific intercepts with a set of Moran-type eigenvectors capturing the dominant spatial dependence patterns implied by a spatial weights
matrix. To estimate the model, we propose a block-coordinate descent
algorithm, combined with soft-thresholded singular value decomposition and cross-validated regularization. Through comprehensive simulations varying missingness patterns, the level of spatial and temporal autocorrelation, and dimension, shape, and rank structure of the
matrices, we demonstrate that ESFNNMC improves imputation accuracy when unit heterogeneity exhibits spatial structure, while remaining competitive under mild departures from this assumption. Furthermore, it keeps the computational cost approximately unchanged. The method is applied to impute missing entries in daily PM10 measurements in 64 monitoring stations in Lombardy, Italy, during the year 2021.
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Machine Learning (Statistics) · Cross-listed from cs.LG
GOTabPFN: From Feature Ordering to Compact Tokenization for Tabular Foundation Models on High-Dimensional Data
Al Zadid Sultan Bin Habib, Md Younus Ahamed, Prashnna Kumar Gyawali et al. (+2 more)
We investigate how to make small tabular foundation models effective for High-Dimensional, Low-Sample Size (HDLSS) tabular prediction without retraining large backbones. We introduce Graph-guided Ordering with Local Refinement (GO-LR), show its equivalence to weighted Minimum Linear Arrangement, and interpret the practical solver as a TSP-path-style surrogate. We propose GOTabPFN,which builds on GO-LR, and a Neuro-Inspired Subunit Compression (NSC) unit to pool locally adjacent ordered features into meta-features, yielding a compact representation that makes TabPFN-style prediction practical in HDLSS regimes. Across tabular
benchmarks, GOTabPFN improves stability and accuracy under tight
token budgets.
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All authors Al Zadid Sultan Bin Habib, Md Younus Ahamed, Prashnna Kumar Gyawali, Gianfranco Doretto, Donald A. Adjeroh
Statistics Applications · Cross-listed from cs.AI
Assessing the Carbon Emissions and Energy Consumption of U.S. Hyperscale Data Centers
Gianluca Guidi, Francesca Dominici, Tiziano Squartini et al. (+6 more)
The rapid proliferation of hyperscale data centers (HDCs) in the US, mainly driven by the adoption of artificial intelligence, has raised concerns about this industry's environmental footprint. We compiled facility-level information on 403 US hyperscale data centers operating between May 2024 and April 2025 and estimated their electricity consumption, electricity sources, and attributable CO2 emissions. Across different facility-load scenarios, these HDCs consumed approximately 68-99 TWh of electricity and were associated with about 37-54 million metric tons of CO2. Under the central scenario, HDC electricity demand corresponded to approximately 1.8% of total US electricity consumption, with roughly 54% of attributed generation supplied by fossil-fuel sources. The HDC electricity-weighted average carbon intensity was approximately 545 gCO2/kWh, about 48% above the contemporaneous US national grid-average carbon intensity of 370 gCO2/kWh. Our approach provides an attributional tool for assessing the environmental footprint of hyperscale data centers using the most recent EPA eGRID plant-level data.
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All authors Gianluca Guidi, Francesca Dominici, Tiziano Squartini, Callaway Sprinkle, Jonathan Gilmour, Kevin Butler, Eric Bell, Scott Delaney, Falco J. Bargagli-Stoffi
Statistical Methodology
Analyzing spatial point processes degraded by displacement and imperfect detection
Kevin M. Collins, Erin M. Schliep, Alan E. Gelfand et al. (+3 more)
Spatial point processes are a valuable tool for probabilistic modeling to explain location data. However, the data themselves are often observed imperfectly. In order to perform accurate inference, one must account for these imperfections, which we refer to as degradation. We consider two forms of degradation for spatial Poisson processes: thinning and displacement. First, we provide some theoretical results on model identifiability, showing that, under weak conditions, one can jointly learn the scale of the displacement, a parametric form of thinning, and a nonparametric intensity function. The ability to learn all of these components and the resulting improvements for inference compared to the conceptual non-degraded but misspecified model are shown empirically via simulation study. Finally, we apply this approach to North Atlantic right whale call data from Cape Cod Bay.
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All authors Kevin M. Collins, Erin M. Schliep, Alan E. Gelfand, Tina M. Yack, Christopher W. Clark, Robert S. Schick
Machine Learning (Statistics) · Cross-listed from cs.LG
Mamba-Assisted Non-Markovian Closure for Reduced-Order Modeling
Zhi-Feng Wei, Saad Qadeer and Panos Stinis
Reduced-order modeling of high-dimensional dynamical systems is often hindered by closure effects arising from unresolved variables, which can introduce non-Markovian dependence into the resolved dynamics. Motivated by the history-dependent
memory term arising in the Mori–Zwanzig formalism, we recast non-Markovian closure modeling as a sequence modeling problem and propose the Mamba-Assisted Closure (MAC) framework. MAC employs a Mamba-based sequence model to predict the closure from the resolved trajectory and couples the learned closure with the reduced-order governing equations through a numerical integrator to advance the resolved variables in time. During training, the selective scan mechanism in Mamba enables efficient parallel sequence processing with linear scaling in sequence length, while autoregressive inference proceeds through recurrent state updates at essentially constant per-step cost. We evaluate MAC on four
benchmark systems with complementary characteristics: the viscous Burgers' equation, the chaotic two-scale Lorenz '96 system, the 3-bus DeMarco–Zheng power-grid system, and the dispersive Korteweg–de Vries equation. Across these
benchmarks, MAC consistently improves predictive accuracy and long-time rollout stability relative to the comparison models, demonstrating an effective and computationally scalable approach to non-Markovian closure modeling.
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Machine Learning (Statistics)
Environment-Robust Representation Learning with Empirical Bayes
Yuli Slavutsky, Matthew Shen, Bohan Wu et al. (+1 more)
We consider multi-environment prediction problems. We assume the environments change the distribution of a latent variable, while the mechanisms generating observed
covariates and targets remain stable conditional on that variable. For example, hospitals or clinical cohorts may differ in the prevalence of latent patient states, even though the relationships between those states, physiological measurements, and outcomes remain unchanged. Given a
dataset from multiple environments, we formulate a
Bayesian model for such problems and derive the corresponding variational objective. We show that this objective decomposes into per-environment terms and an additional cross-environment balancing term induced by the model's structure. We use an empirical Bayes method to set the prior and incorporate it into the objective. Based on this objective, we develop an amortized variational
algorithm for posterior approximation, and use the resulting learned latent variables to form predictions in new environments.We study our approach through simulations and real-world studies of astronomical source identification, microbiome-based disease detection, and ICU sepsis prediction. Across these settings, our method outperforms previous approaches for prediction in new environments.
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All authors Yuli Slavutsky, Matthew Shen, Bohan Wu, David M. Blei
Machine Learning (Statistics)
TabSODA: Tabular Diffusion based Imputation with Skip Pattern Detection and Ordinal Awareness
Yuyu Chen, Taehyo Kim, Hai Shu et al. (+1 more)
Missing data imputation in large-scale surveys faces two challenges that are not well handled by current tabular
diffusion methods. First, structural skips,
cells made inapplicable by questionnaire design, should not be imputed but are often conflated with item nonresponse. Second, ordinal responses encode ordered categories, yet most pipelines treat them as nominal levels through one-hot or analog-bit encodings. We introduce TabSODA (Tabular
diffusion with Skip pattern detection and Ordinal Awareness), an Expectation-Maximization (EM)-based
diffusion imputer built on the Elucidated
Diffusion Model (EDM) framework. TabSODA propagates structural skips through the denoising loss and reverse-time sampler, and represents ordinal variables with cumulative-probit scalar latents while retaining analog-bit encodings for nominal variables. When a codebook skip mask is available, TabSODA uses it directly; otherwise, the TabSODA+SKIP variant estimates the mask from raw responses and questionnaire order using a CART-based skip-pattern miner. On Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health (PATH) study and the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), two nationally representative U.S.\ surveys, TabSODA reduces ordinal MACE by up to $23.7\%$ and improves categorical accuracy by up to $9\%$ over the strongest baseline across MCAR, MAR, and MNAR masking. The skip miner achieves near-perfect precision on both
datasets, allowing TabSODA+SKIP to closely track the codebook-mask variant.
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All authors Yuyu Chen, Taehyo Kim, Hai Shu, Yang Feng
Statistical Computation · Cross-listed from cs.PL
Incremental Computation for Efficient Programmable Inference in Probabilistic Programs
Fabian Zaiser, Jack Czenszak, Martin C. Rinard et al. (+2 more)
Inference in probabilistic programs generally requires evaluating many possible program executions to find those of high posterior density. To scale inference to large
datasets, it is crucial that expensive intermediate results are shared across these many evaluations, rather than recomputed from scratch. This paper presents a new approach to realizing this sharing, based on incremental computation, a technique for efficiently recomputing (deterministic) program outputs when program inputs change. First, we show how expressive probabilistic programs can be compiled to deterministic ones that compute their density functions. Then, building on the incremental $\lambda$-calculus, we develop a general technique for compositionally incrementalizing expressive functional programs, and apply it to these densities. The resulting incremental densities can be used to accelerate a broad range of Monte Carlo inference
algorithms, including for nonparametric models not well supported by existing systems. Furthermore, our decomposition of incremental density computation into separate density and incrementalization steps allows for modular
reasoning about correctness – a key pain point in existing systems, where ad-hoc incrementalization features are a known source of soundness bugs. We develop denotational logical relations arguments for the correctness of each step independently, and implement the approach in a Julia prototype, finding that it leads to asymptotic runtime improvements in the size of the
dataset on a range of models and inference
algorithms.
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All authors Fabian Zaiser, Jack Czenszak, Martin C. Rinard, Vikash K. Mansinghka, Alexander K. Lew
Machine Learning (Statistics) · Cross-listed from cs.LG
A prism hierarchy of learning regimes in large linear autoencoders
Eugene Golikov, Yaroslav Gusev and Dmitry Yarotsky
Theoretical studies of machine learning models commonly consider different limiting regimes in which the learning dynamics of gradient descent becomes theoretically tractable. It is, however, desirable to have a systematically obtained picture of qualitatively different extreme learning regimes for a particular type of models. In this paper we propose such a picture for large weight-tied linear autoencoders characterized by input and latent dimensions, initialization magnitude, and training set size. This model is nonlinear in the weights and its gradient flow does not have a general theoretical solution. We show that at the level of the formal loss-expansion hierarchy, its extreme regimes are naturally associated with faces of a triangular prism. In particular, there are five basic extreme regimes associated with the 2-faces of the prism: (1) large-data, (2) small-data, (3) mean-field, (4) narrow-latent, and (5) free. For regimes (1,2,3,4), we derive and rigorously characterize the limiting train and population dynamics under gradient flow, rigorously prove convergence to these limits, and get good agreement with experimental results. The resulting limits reveal spectral critical slowing, initialization-driven trapping away from the PCA optimum, and regimes in which population loss converges exponentially while training loss relaxes only algebraically.
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