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In this paper, we propose a new spectral-based approach to hypothesis testing for populations of networks. The primary goal is to develop a test to determine whether two given samples of networks come from the same random model or distribution. Our test statistic is based on the trace of the third order for a centered and scaled adjacency matrix, which we prove converges to the standard normal distribution as the number of nodes tends to infinity. The asymptotic power guarantee of the test is also provided. The proper interplay between the number of networks and the number of nodes for each network is explored in characterizing the theoretical properties of the proposed testing statistics. Our tests are applicable to both binary and weighted networks, operate under a very general framework where the networks are allowed to be large and sparse, and can be extended to multiple-sample testing. We provide an extensive simulation study to demonstrate the superior performance of our test over existing methods and apply our test to three real datasets.

Selecting hyperparameters for unsupervised learning problems is challenging in general due to the lack of ground truth for validation. Despite the prevalence of this issue in statistics and machine learning, especially in clustering problems, there are not many methods for tuning these hyperparameters with theoretical guarantees. In this paper, we provide a framework with provable guarantees for selecting hyperparameters in a number of distinct models. We consider both the subgaussian mixture model and network models to serve as examples of i.i.d. and non-i.i.d. data. We demonstrate that the same framework can be used to choose the Lagrange multipliers of penalty terms in semi-definite programming (SDP) relaxations for community detection, and the bandwidth parameter for constructing kernel similarity matrices for spectral clustering. By incorporating a cross-validation procedure, we show the framework can also do consistent model selection for network models. Using a variety of simulated and real data examples, we show that our framework outperforms other widely used tuning procedures in a broad range of parameter settings.

We assume a spatial blind source separation model in which the observed multivariate spatial data is a linear mixture of latent spatially uncorrelated random fields containing a number of pure white noise components. We propose a test on the number of white noise components and obtain the asymptotic distribution of its statistic for a general domain. We also demonstrate how computations can be facilitated in the case of gridded observation locations. Based on this test, we obtain a consistent estimator of the true dimension. Simulation studies and an environmental application in the Supplemental Material demonstrate that our test is at least comparable to and often outperforms bootstrap-based techniques, which are also introduced in this paper. peerReviewed

High-dimensional self-exciting point processes have been widely used in many application areas to model discrete event data in which past and current events affect the likelihood of future events. In this paper, we are concerned with detecting abrupt changes of the coefficient matrices in discrete-time high-dimensional self-exciting Poisson processes, which have yet to be studied in the existing literature due to both theoretical and computational challenges rooted in the non-stationary and high-dimensional nature of the underlying process. We propose a penalized dynamic programming approach which is supported by a theoretical rate analysis and numerical evidence.

The new identifiable case appeared in \cite{AGMO}, together with the analysis on simultaneous identifiability of pairs of ternary forms recently developed in \cite{BG}, suggested the following conjecture towards a complete classification of all simultaneous Waring identifiable cases: for any $ d \geq 2 $, the general polynomial vectors consisting of $ d-1 $ ternary forms of degree $ d $ and a ternary form of degree $ d+1 $, with rank $ \frac{d^2+d+2}{2} $, are identifiable over $ \mathbf{C} $. In this paper, by means of a computer-aided procedure inspired to the one described in \cite{AGMO}, we obtain that the case $ d = 4 $ contradicts the previous conjecture, admitting at least $ 36 $ complex simultaneous Waring decompositions (of length $ 11 $) instead of $ 1 $., Comment: 10 pages, accepted for publication on Journal of Symbolic Computation