Publications related to The Banff challenge: Statistical detection of a noisy signal

Technosignatures Longevity and Lindy's Law

The probability of detecting technosignatures (i.e., evidence of technological activity beyond Earth) increases with their longevity, or the time interval over which they manifest. Therefore, the assumed distribution of longevities has some bearing on the ...

Iop Publishing Ltd2024

Anthony C Davison and Igor Rodionov's contribution to the Discussion of 'Estimating means of bounded random variables by betting' by Waudby-Smith and Ramdas

Anthony Christopher Davison, Igor Rodionov

We derive confidence intervals (CIs) and confidence sequences (CSs) for the classical problem of estimating a bounded mean. Our approach generalizes and improves on the celebrated Chernoff method, yielding the best closed-form "empirical-Bernstein" CSs and ...

Oxford Univ Press2024

Robot Learning using Tensor Networks

Suhan Narayana Shetty

In various robotics applications, the selection of function approximation methods greatly influences the feasibility and computational efficiency of algorithms. Tensor Networks (TNs), also referred to as tensor decomposition techniques, present a versatile ...

EPFL2024

Experimental characterization and stochastic models for time-dependent rupture of thin-ply composite laminates

Thin-laminate composites with thicknesses below 200 mu m hold significant promise for future, larger, and lighter deployable structures. This paper presents a study of the time-dependent failure behavior of thin carbon-fiber laminates under bending, focusi ...

2024

ZigZag: Universal Sampling-free Uncertainty Estimation Through Two-Step Inference

Nikita Durasov, Nik Joel Dorndorf, Minh Hieu Lê

Whereas the ability of deep networks to produce useful predictions on many kinds of data has been amply demonstrated, estimating the reliability of these predictions remains challenging. Sampling approaches such as MC-Dropout and Deep Ensembles have emerge ...

2024

Precision luminosity measurement at hadron colliders

Joanna Malgorzata Wanczyk

This thesis links two realms of particle accelerator dynamics and precision particle physics. The achievement of precise luminosity measurement at hadron colliders is enabled with dedicated luminometers. For the Run 3 period, the luminometer upgrade was ...

EPFL2024

Higher Order Asymptotics: Applications to Satellite Conjunction and Boundary Problems

Soumaya Elkantassi

Higher-order asymptotics provide accurate approximations for use in parametric statistical modelling. In this thesis, we investigate using higher-order approximations in two-specific settings, with a particular emphasis on the tangent exponential model. ...

EPFL2023

An Unbiased Method of Measuring the Ratio of Two Data Sets

Jean-Paul Richard Kneib, Huanyuan Shan

In certain cases of astronomical data analysis, the meaningful physical quantity to extract is the ratio R between two data sets. Examples include the lensing ratio, the interloper rate in spectroscopic redshift samples, and the decay rate of gravitational ...

IOP Publishing Ltd2023

Distribution Inference Risks: Identifying and Mitigating Sources of Leakage

Léo Nicolas René Meynent, Maxime Jean Julien Peyrard, Robert West, Valentin Hartmann

A large body of work shows that machine learning (ML) models can leak sensitive or confidential information about their training data. Recently, leakage due to distribution inference (or property inference) attacks is gaining attention. In this attack, the ...

IEEE COMPUTER SOC2023

Maximum likelihood bolometry for ASDEX upgrade experiments

Olivier Claude Martin Février, Riccardo Rossi

Bolometry is an essential diagnostic for calculating the power balances and for the understanding of different physical aspects of tokamak experiments. The reconstruction method based on the Maximum Likelihood (ML) principle, developed initially for JET, h ...

Iop Publishing Ltd2023

Wind, Hail, and Climate Extremes: Modelling and Attribution Studies for Environmental Data

Ophélia Mireille Anna Miralles

This thesis presents work at the junction of statistics and climate science. We first provide methodology for use by climate scientists when performing fast event attribution using extreme value theory, and then describe two interdisciplinary projects in c ...

EPFL2023

Personalized Privacy-Preserving Distributed Learning on Heterogeneous Data

Michael Christoph Gastpar, Aditya Pradeep

One major challenge in distributed learning is to efficiently learn for each client when the data across clients is heterogeneous or non iid (not independent or identically distributed). This provides a significant challenge as the data of the other client ...

2023

A Shape Derivative Approach to Domain Simplification

Ondine Gabrielle Chanon, Annalisa Buffa, Alessandra Arrigoni, Jochen Peter Hinz

The objective of this study is to address the difficulty of simplifying the geometric model in which a differential problem is formulated, also called defeaturing, while simultaneously ensuring that the accuracy of the solution is maintained under control. ...

Elsevier Sci Ltd2023

Euclid preparation: XXVIII. Forecasts for ten different higher-order weak lensing statistics

Frédéric Courbin, Fabio Finelli, Richard Massey, Maurizio Martinelli, Jean-Luc Starck, Gianluca Castignani, Marcello Farina, Austin Chandler Peel, Yi Wang

Recent cosmic shear studies have shown that higher-order statistics (HOS) developed by independent teams now outperform standard two-point estimators in terms of statistical precision thanks to their sensitivity to the non-Gaussian features of large-scale ...

EDP SCIENCES S A2023

Microgravity induces overconfidence in perceptual decision-making

Davide Scaramuzza, Christian Pfeiffer, Leyla Loued-Khenissi

Does gravity affect decision-making? This question comes into sharp focus as plans for interplanetary human space missions solidify. In the framework of Bayesian brain theories, gravity encapsulates a strong prior, anchoring agents to a reference frame via ...

Nature Portfolio2023

Fundamental Limits in Statistical Learning Problems: Block Models and Neural Networks

Elisabetta Cornacchia

This thesis focuses on two selected learning problems: 1) statistical inference on graphs models, and, 2) gradient descent on neural networks, with the common objective of defining and analysing the measures that characterize the fundamental limits. In th ...

EPFL2023

Confidence Matters: Applications to Semantic Segmentation

Prabhu Teja Sivaprasad

The successes of deep learning for semantic segmentation can in be, in part, attributed to its scale: a notion that encapsulates the largeness of these computational architectures and the labeled datasets they are trained on. These resource requirements hi ...

EPFL2023

Search for Higgs Boson Decay to a Charm Quark-Antiquark Pair in Proton-Proton Collisions at √s=13 TeV

Rakesh Chawla, Andrea Rizzi, Matthias Finger, Federica Legger, Matteo Galli, Sun Hee Kim, Jian Zhao, João Miguel das Neves Duarte, Tagir Aushev, Hua Zhang, Alexis Kalogeropoulos, Yixing Chen, Tian Cheng, Ioannis Papadopoulos, Gabriele Grosso, Valérie Scheurer, Meng Xiao, Qian Wang, Michele Bianco, Varun Sharma, Joao Varela, Sourav Sen, Ashish Sharma, Seungkyu Ha, David Vannerom, Csaba Hajdu, Sanjeev Kumar, Sebastiana Gianì, Kun Shi, Abhisek Datta, Miao Hu, Siyuan Wang, Muhammad Waqas, Anton Petrov, Jian Wang, Yi Zhang, Lei Zhang, Muhammad Ansar Iqbal, Yong Yang, Xin Sun, Muhammad Ahmad, Donghyun Kim, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A note on universal inference

Anthony Christopher Davison, Timmy Rong Tian Tse

Universal inference enables the construction of confidence intervals and tests without regularity conditions by splitting the data into two parts and appealing to Markov's inequality. Previous investigations have shown that the cost of this generality is a ...

WILEY2022

Filtered data and eigenfunction estimators for statistical inference of multiscale and interacting diffusion processes

Andrea Zanoni

We study the problem of learning unknown parameters of stochastic dynamical models from data. Often, these models are high dimensional and contain several scales and complex structures. One is then interested in obtaining a reduced, coarse-grained descript ...

EPFL2022