Model selection over partially ordered sets.

In problems such as variable selection and graph estimation, models are characterized by Boolean logical structure such as the presence or absence of a variable or an edge. Consequently, false-positive error or false-negative error can be specified as the number of variables/edges that are incorrectly included or excluded in an estimated model. However, there are several other problems such as ranking, clustering, and causal inference in which the associated model classes do not admit transparent notions of false-positive and false-negative errors due to the lack of an underlying Boolean logical structure. In this paper, we present a generic approach to endow a collection of models with partial order structure, which leads to a hierarchical organization of model classes as well as natural analogs of false-positive and false-negative errors. We describe model selection procedures that provide false-positive error control in our general setting, and we illustrate their utility with numerical experiments.

Computational and statistical tradeoffs via convex relaxation.

Modern massive datasets create a fundamental problem at the intersection of the computational and statistical sciences: how to provide guarantees on the quality of statistical inference given bounds on computational resources, such as time or space. Our approach to this problem is to define a notion of "algorithmic weakening," in which a hierarchy of algorithms is ordered by both computational efficiency and statistical efficiency, allowing the growing strength of the data at scale to be traded off against the need for sophisticated processing. We illustrate this approach in the setting of denoising problems, using convex relaxation as the core inferential tool. Hierarchies of convex relaxations have been widely used in theoretical computer science to yield tractable approximation algorithms to many computationally intractable tasks. In the current paper, we show how to endow such hierarchies with a statistical characterization and thereby obtain concrete tradeoffs relating algorithmic runtime to amount of data.