Nanbo Peng

Yaquan Zhang, Qi Wu, Nanbo Peng et al.

The essence of multivariate sequential learning is all about how to extract dependencies in data. These data sets, such as hourly medical records in intensive care units and multi-frequency phonetic time series, often time exhibit not only strong serial dependencies in the individual components (the "marginal" memory) but also non-negligible memories in the cross-sectional dependencies (the "joint" memory). Because of the multivariate complexity in the evolution of the joint distribution that underlies the data generating process, we take a data-driven approach and construct a novel recurrent network architecture, termed Memory-Gated Recurrent Networks (mGRN), with gates explicitly regulating two distinct types of memories: the marginal memory and the joint memory. Through a combination of comprehensive simulation studies and empirical experiments on a range of public datasets, we show that our proposed mGRN architecture consistently outperforms state-of-the-art architectures targeting multivariate time series.

Yiyan Huang, Cheuk Hang Leung, Xing Yan et al.

This paper focuses on the expected difference in borrower's repayment when there is a change in the lender's credit decisions. Classical estimators overlook the confounding effects and hence the estimation error can be magnificent. As such, we propose another approach to construct the estimators such that the error can be greatly reduced. The proposed estimators are shown to be unbiased, consistent, and robust through a combination of theoretical analysis and numerical testing. Moreover, we compare the power of estimating the causal quantities between the classical estimators and the proposed estimators. The comparison is tested across a wide range of models, including linear regression models, tree-based models, and neural network-based models, under different simulated datasets that exhibit different levels of causality, different degrees of nonlinearity, and different distributional properties. Most importantly, we apply our approaches to a large observational dataset provided by a global technology firm that operates in both the e-commerce and the lending business. We find that the relative reduction of estimation error is strikingly substantial if the causal effects are accounted for correctly.

Qi Wu, Shumin Ma, Cheuk Hang Leung et al.

This paper provides a non-robust interpretation of the distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problem by relating the distributional uncertainties to the chance probabilities. Our analysis allows a decision-maker to interpret the size of the ambiguity set, which is often lack of business meaning, through the chance parameters constraining the objective function. We first show that, for general $φ$-divergences, a DRO problem is asymptotically equivalent to a class of mean-deviation problems. These mean-deviation problems are not subject to uncertain distributions, and the ambiguity radius in the original DRO problem now plays the role of controlling the risk preference of the decision-maker. We then demonstrate that a DRO problem can be cast as a chance-constrained optimization (CCO) problem when a boundedness constraint is added to the decision variables. Without the boundedness constraint, the CCO problem is shown to perform uniformly better than the DRO problem, irrespective of the radius of the ambiguity set, the choice of the divergence measure, or the tail heaviness of the center distribution. Thanks to our high-order expansion result, a notable feature of our analysis is that it applies to divergence measures that accommodate well heavy tail distributions such as the student $t$-distribution and the lognormal distribution, besides the widely-used Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, which requires the distribution of the objective function to be exponentially bounded. Using the portfolio selection problem as an example, our comprehensive testings on multivariate heavy-tail datasets, both synthetic and real-world, shows that this business-interpretation approach is indeed useful and insightful.