Andrea Zanoni

Paolo Cifani, Franco Flandoli, Andrea Zanoni

Modeling turbulent flows by a random Fourier decomposition is a classical procedure in order to use simplified models of turbulence in heat transport and other applications. We carefully investigate the Fourier time series of two-dimensional turbulent flows forced at intermediate scales and identify significant statistical structures. In particular, we find the existence of a typical time correlation length, and propose a stochastic model for the Fourier components. Finally, we compute the transport of a passive tracer under purely convective dynamics by means of direct numerical simulation of the turbulent flow and compare it with the effective diffusion produced by the stochastic model.

Chloe H. Choi, Andrea Zanoni, Daniele E. Schiavazzi et al.

Solving inverse problems in cardiovascular modeling is particularly challenging due to the high computational cost of running high-fidelity simulations. In this work, we focus on Bayesian parameter estimation and explore different methods to reduce the computational cost of sampling from the posterior distribution by leveraging low-fidelity approximations. A common approach is to construct a surrogate model for the high-fidelity simulation itself. Another is to build a surrogate for the discrepancy between high- and low-fidelity models. This discrepancy, which is often easier to approximate, is modeled with either a fully connected neural network or a nonlinear dimensionality reduction technique that enables surrogate construction in a lower-dimensional space. A third possible approach is to treat the discrepancy between the high-fidelity and surrogate models as random noise and estimate its distribution using normalizing flows. This allows us to incorporate the approximation error into the Bayesian inverse problem by modifying the likelihood function. We validate five different methods which are variations of the above on analytical test cases by comparing them to posterior distributions derived solely from high-fidelity models, assessing both accuracy and computational cost. Finally, we demonstrate our approaches on two cardiovascular examples of increasing complexity: a lumped-parameter Windkessel model and a patient-specific three-dimensional anatomy.

Santiago Mazuelas, Andrea Zanoni, Aritz Perez

Supervised classification techniques use training samples to find classification rules with small expected 0-1 loss. Conventional methods achieve efficient learning and out-of-sample generalization by minimizing surrogate losses over specific families of rules. This paper presents minimax risk classifiers (MRCs) that do not rely on a choice of surrogate loss and family of rules. MRCs achieve efficient learning and out-of-sample generalization by minimizing worst-case expected 0-1 loss w.r.t. uncertainty sets that are defined by linear constraints and include the true underlying distribution. In addition, MRCs' learning stage provides performance guarantees as lower and upper tight bounds for expected 0-1 loss. We also present MRCs' finite-sample generalization bounds in terms of training size and smallest minimax risk, and show their competitive classification performance w.r.t. state-of-the-art techniques using benchmark datasets.

Santiago Mazuelas, Andrea Zanoni, Aritz Perez

Conventional techniques for supervised classification constrain the classification rules considered and use surrogate losses for classification 0-1 loss. Favored families of classification rules are those that enjoy parametric representations suitable for surrogate loss minimization, and low complexity properties suitable for overfitting control. This paper presents classification techniques based on robust risk minimization (RRM) that we call linear probabilistic classifiers (LPCs). The proposed techniques consider unconstrained classification rules, optimize the classification 0-1 loss, and provide performance bounds during learning. LPCs enable efficient learning by using linear optimization, and avoid overffiting by using RRM over polyhedral uncertainty sets of distributions. We also provide finite-sample generalization bounds for LPCs and show their competitive performance with state-of-the-art techniques using benchmark datasets.