An affine invariant p-th moment measure is defined for a random vector and used to prove sharp moment-entropy inequalities that are more general and stronger than standard moment-entropy inequalities.

Poisson equation on point cloud with Dirichlet boundary condition plays important role in many problems. In this paper, we use the volume constraint proposed by Du et.al to handle the Dirichlet boundary condition in the point integral method for Poisson equation on point cloud. We prove that the solution given by volume constraint converges to the true solution as the point cloud converges to the underlying smooth manifold.

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.

The Laplace-Beltrami operator (LBO) is a fundamental object associated to Riemannian manifolds, which encodes all intrinsic geometry of the manifolds and has many desirable prop- erties. Recently, we proposed a novel numerical method, Point Integral method (PIM), to discretize the Laplace-Beltrami operator on point clouds [28]. In this paper, we analyze the convergence of Point Integral method (PIM) for Poisson equation with Neumann boundary condition on submanifolds isometrically embedded in Euclidean spaces.

We study the problem of constructing sparse and fast mean revert- ing portfolios. The problem is motivated by convergence trading and formu- lated as a generalized eigenvalue problem with a cardinality constraint [6]. We use a proxy of mean reversion coefficient, the direct Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) estimator, which can be applied to both stationary and nonstationary data. In addition, we introduce three different methods to enforce the sparsity of the solutions. One method uses the ratio of l1 and l2 norms and the other two use l1 norm. We analyze various formulations of the resulting non-convex opti- mization problems and develop efficient algorithms to solve them for portfolio sizes as large as hundreds. By adopting a simple convergence trading strat- egy, we test the performance of our sparse mean reverting portfolios on both synthetic and historical real market data. In particular, the l1 regularization method, in combination with quadratic program formulation as well as differ-ence of convex functions and least angle regression treatment, gives fast and robust performance on large out-of-sample data set. To appear in Journal of Scientific Computing (JOMP).