Gambling-Based Confidence Sequences for Bounded Random Vectors

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Ryu, J. Jon, Wornell, Gregory W.
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Ryu, J. Jon
Wornell, Gregory W.
author_facet Ryu, J. Jon
Wornell, Gregory W.
contents A confidence sequence (CS) is a sequence of confidence sets that contains a target parameter of an underlying stochastic process at any time step with high probability. This paper proposes a new approach to constructing CSs for means of bounded multivariate stochastic processes using a general gambling framework, extending the recently established coin toss framework for bounded random processes. The proposed gambling framework provides a general recipe for constructing CSs for categorical and probability-vector-valued observations, as well as for general bounded multidimensional observations through a simple reduction. This paper specifically explores the use of the mixture portfolio, akin to Cover's universal portfolio, in the proposed framework and investigates the properties of the resulting CSs. Simulations demonstrate the tightness of these confidence sequences compared to existing methods. When applied to the sampling without-replacement setting for finite categorical data, it is shown that the resulting CS based on a universal gambling strategy is provably tighter than that of the posterior-prior ratio martingale proposed by Waudby-Smith and Ramdas.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_03683
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Gambling-Based Confidence Sequences for Bounded Random Vectors
Ryu, J. Jon
Wornell, Gregory W.
Methodology
Information Theory
Statistics Theory
A confidence sequence (CS) is a sequence of confidence sets that contains a target parameter of an underlying stochastic process at any time step with high probability. This paper proposes a new approach to constructing CSs for means of bounded multivariate stochastic processes using a general gambling framework, extending the recently established coin toss framework for bounded random processes. The proposed gambling framework provides a general recipe for constructing CSs for categorical and probability-vector-valued observations, as well as for general bounded multidimensional observations through a simple reduction. This paper specifically explores the use of the mixture portfolio, akin to Cover's universal portfolio, in the proposed framework and investigates the properties of the resulting CSs. Simulations demonstrate the tightness of these confidence sequences compared to existing methods. When applied to the sampling without-replacement setting for finite categorical data, it is shown that the resulting CS based on a universal gambling strategy is provably tighter than that of the posterior-prior ratio martingale proposed by Waudby-Smith and Ramdas.
title Gambling-Based Confidence Sequences for Bounded Random Vectors
topic Methodology
Information Theory
Statistics Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03683