A masked spectral bound for maximum-entropy sampling

We introduce a new masked spectral bound for the maximum-entropy sampling problem. This bound is a continuous generalization of the very effective spectral partition bound. Optimization of the masked spectral bound requires the minimization of a nonconvex, nondifferentiable function over a semidefiniteness constraint. We describe a nonlinear affine scaling algorithm to approximately minimize the bound. … Read more

Distance Weighted Discrimination

High Dimension Low Sample Size statistical analysis is becoming increasingly important in a wide range of applied contexts. In such situations, it is seen that the popular Support Vector Machine suffers from “data piling” at the margin, which can diminish generalizability. This leads naturally to the development of Distance Weighted Discrimination, which is based on … Read more

Bounds on measures satisfying moment conditions

Given a semi algebraic set S of R^n we provide a numerical approximation procedure that yields upper and lower bounds on mu(S), for measures mu that satisfy some given moment conditions. The bounds are obtained as solutions of positive semidefinite programs that can be solved via standard software packages like the LMI MATLAB toolbox. Citation … Read more