We define the notion of a Ricci curvature lower bound for parametrized statistical models. Following the seminal ideas of Lott–Sturm–Villani, we define this notion based on the geodesic convexity of the Kullback–Leibler divergence in a Wasserstein statistical manifold, that is, a manifold of probability distributions endowed with a Wasserstein metric tensor structure. Within these definitions, which are based on Fisher information matrix and Wasserstein Christoffel symbols, the Ricci curvature is related to both, information geometry and Wasserstein geometry. These definitions allow us to formulate bounds on the convergence rate of Wasserstein gradient flows and information functional inequalities in parameter space. We discuss examples of Ricci curvature lower bounds and convergence rates in exponential family models.

We propose a numerical approach to solve variational problems on manifolds represented by the grid based particle method (GBPM) recently developed in Leung et al. (J. Comput. Phys. 230(7):25402561, 2011), Leung and Zhao (J. Comput. Phys. 228:77067728, 2009a, J. Comput. Phys. 228:29933024, 2009b, Commun. Comput. Phys. 8:758796, 2010). In particular, we propose a splitting algorithm for image segmentation on manifolds represented by unconnected sampling particles. To develop a fast minimization algorithm, we propose a new splitting method by generalizing the augmented Lagrangian method. To efficiently implement the resulting method, we incorporate with the local polynomial approximations of the manifold in the GBPM. The resulting method is flexible for segmentation on various manifolds including closed or open or even surfaces which are not orientable.

Quantitatively identifying direct dependencies between variables is an important task in data analysis, in particular for reconstructing various types of networks and causal relations in science and engineering. One of the most widely used criteria is partial correlation, but it can only measure linearly direct association and miss nonlinear associations. However, based on conditional independence, conditional mutual information (CMI) is able to quantify nonlinearly direct relationships among variables from the observed data, superior to linear measures, but suffers from a serious problem of underestimation, in particular for those variables with tight associations in a network, which severely limits its applications. In this work, we propose a new concept, “partial independence,” with a new measure, “part mutual information” (PMI), which not only can overcome the problem of CMI but also retains the quantification properties of both mutual information (MI) and CMI. Specifically, we first defined PMI to measure nonlinearly direct dependencies between variables and then derived its relations with MI and CMI. Finally, we used a number of simulated data as benchmark examples to numerically demonstrate PMI features and further real gene expression data from Escherichia coli and yeast to reconstruct gene regulatory networks, which all validated the advantages of PMI for accurately quantifying nonlinearly direct associations in networks.

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We establish necessary and sufficient conditions for consistent root reconstruction in continuous-time Markov models with countable state space on bounded-height trees. Here a root state estimator is said to be consistent if the probability that it returns to the true root state converges to 1 as the number of leaves tends to infinity. We also derive quantitative bounds on the error of reconstruction. Our results answer a question of Gascuel and Steel [GS10] and have implications for ancestral sequence reconstruction in a classical evolutionary model of nucleotide insertion and deletion [TKF91].

For a random quantum state on $\cH=\C^d \otimes \C^d$ obtained by partial tracing a random pure state on $\cH \otimes \C^s$, we consider the question whether it is typically separable or typically entangled. For this problem, we show the existence of a sharp threshold $s_0=s_0(d)$ of order roughly $d^3$. More precisely, for any $\e>0$ and for $d$ large enough, such a random state is entangled with very large probability when $s \leq (1-\e)s_0$, and separable with very large probability when $s \geq (1+\e) s_0$. One consequence of this result is as follows: for a system of $N$ identical particles in a random pure state, there is a threshold $k_0 = k_0(N)\sim N/5$ such that two subsystems of $k$ particles each typically share entanglement if $k>k_0$, and typically do not share entanglement if $k<k_0$. Our methods work also for multipartite systems and for ``unbalanced'' systems such as $\C^{d_1} \otimes \C^{d_2} $, ${d_1} \neq {d_2} $. The arguments rely on random matrices, classical convexity, high-dimensional probability and geometry of Banach spaces; some of the auxiliary results may be of reference value.

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In this paper, we give an almost complete classication of toric surface codes of dimension less than or equal to 7, according to monomially equivalence. This is a natural extension of our previous work [YZ], [LYZZ]. More pairs of monomially equivalent toric codes constructed from non-equivalent lattice polytopes are discovered. A new phenomenon appears, that is, the monomially non-equivalence of two toric codes C P(10)7and CP(19)7 can be discerned on Fq, for all q  8, except q = 29. This sudden break seems to be strange and interesting. Moreover, the parameters, such as the numbers of codewords with dierent weights, depends on q heavily. More meticulous analyses have been made to have the possible distinct families of reducible polynomials.

We propose BinaryRelax, a simple two-phase algorithm, for training deep neural networks with quantized weights. The set constraint that characterizes the quantization of weights is not imposed until the late stage of training, and a sequence of pseudo quantized weights is maintained. Specifically, we relax the hard constraint into a continuous regularizer via Moreau envelope, which turns out to be the squared Euclidean distance to the set of quantized weights. The pseudo quantized weights are obtained by linearly interpolating between the float weights and their quantizations. A continuation strategy is adopted to push the weights towards the quantized state by gradually increasing the regularization parameter. In the second phase, exact quantization scheme with a small learning rate is invoked to guarantee fully quantized weights. We test BinaryRelax on the benchmark CIFAR- 10 and CIFAR-100 color image datasets to demonstrate the superiority of the relaxed quantization approach and the improved accuracy over the state-of-the-art training methods. Finally, we prove the convergence of BinaryRelax under an approximate orthogonality condition.