arXiv preprints from January 1, 2026 through September 11, 2026 — 08:06:08 EST
Age is a match trait and a prominent label on search platforms. Using confidential records from a large Japanese marriage platform, I study how a birthday age update affects consideration, applications, relationship progression, and engagement. Only displayed age updates at birthdays. Receivers enter some acceptable-age ranges as they...
Rigorous economic models can take months to construct, yet energy crises demand decisions from policymakers within days or even hours. Any disruption in energy markets is not isolated but rapidly disseminates through interlinked global systems. Off-the-shelf models that already exist typically focus only on limited aspects of the...
Understanding differences in microbial community structure is critical for uncovering risk factors and mechanisms underlying diseases such as colorectal cancer and preterm birth. Microbiome data present unique statistical challenges because they are compositional in nature, violating assumptions of many classical inference procedures....
Deep generative models (DGMs) are widely used for complex high-dimensional data and increasingly applied to spatial and spatio-temporal modeling. Their generated samples implicitly represent the learned data distribution and associated uncertainty. However, for real-world data, assessing whether DGMs have learned the underlying...
We illustrate in several examples that even neural networks of infinite width (specifically, Barron functions) may encounter substantial obstacles when used as a model class for problems in the calculus of variations. An instance of practical relevance concerns the bending, stretching and folding of a thin elastic shell with anchored...
Large-scale observational studies increasingly rely on AI pipelines to extract structured variables from unstructured clinical records. A common workflow separates the data vendor, who validates extraction accuracy with a gold-standard sample, from the downstream researcher, who receives only the extracted dataset and summary accuracy...
Wind-power variability is a major challenge for the reliable integration of utility-scale wind energy into modern power systems. Although wind-speed statistics are often described by simple parametric distributions, translating these statistics into turbine-level power fluctuations is nontrivial because the relationship between wind...
Meta-analyzing natural indirect effect estimates from multiple studies is increas- ingly used to synthesize evidence on causal pathways of interest. However, stan- dard mediation meta-analysis approaches are typically based on structural equation modeling, which fails to account for mediator-outcome confounding, is not read- ily...
Two-study meta-analyses are common in evidence synthesis but pose major statistical challenges. With only two studies, the between-study variance cannot be reliably estimated, rendering standard random-effects methods unstable. Here, we investigate meta-analyses based on Edgington's p-value combination method as an alternative...
The Expected Value of Sample Information (EVSI) is a powerful instrument to determine the value of additional evidence to inform an economic model. However, EVSI has been applied only to idealized data collection mechanisms, thereby reducing its potential applications in realistic studies. In this paper, we define a methodology to...
Many statistical problems concern the analysis of species distributions or, more generally, of discrete labeled quantities. Assessing species diversity constitutes a key step toward understanding population structure, and the Gini-Simpson index is among the most widely adopted diversity measures. In this manuscript, we examine several...
The framework of recanting twin path-specific effects has recently been propose to address the issue of intermediate confounding in causal mediation analysis, enabling the decomposition of the average treatment effect into identifiable fine-grained path-specific effects (PSEs). An open question, however, is the extent to which...
Generalised Bayesian inference (GBI) has emerged as a compelling robust alternative to standard Bayesian inference, mitigating sensitivity to data contamination by replacing the log-likelihood with a robust loss or divergence. However, existing robust GBI frameworks typically provide only qualitative robustness: while they can make...
Machine learning demand forecasts optimize statistical accuracy yet leave excess operational volatility that inflates safety stock and amplifies the Bullwhip effect. We introduce \textbf{Contextual Deconvolution} (CD), a two-stage estimator that reframes demand sensing as a convex decomposition: a kernel-modulated banded operator...
Among chess opening positions that a strong engine judges essentially equal (Stockfish 18 evaluation within 10 centipawns of zero, depth-stable) and that humans actually reach on Lichess (October 2025; 1,661 positions, 16.1M occurrences), human results are not balanced. Positions carry outcome skews, each the gap between its games'...
The collective risk model is a fundamental framework in insurance ratemaking for modeling aggregate losses by combining claim frequency and claim severity components. A key structural requirement for a reliable experience rating system is a monotone ordering property: policyholders with worse past experience should receive a...
In the field of building energy efficiency, the measurement and verification (M&V) of energy savings following energy efficiency measures often relies on the use of a calibrated statistical model. In order to obtain reliable estimates, the estimation of uncertainties associated with this procedure is recognized as a crucial aspect of...
In meta-analyses of proportions, the event of interest is often rare, resulting in sparse event counts and frequent zero-event studies. The beta-binomial model has been used as a flexible random-effects model for pooling overdispersed and rare-event proportions. However, the commonly used maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) may be...
We propose a randomized iterative method for the ordinary least-squares estimation problem in large-scale linear statistical models, namely the Sequential Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient Method (SPCG). SPCG constructs a sequence of sketched least-squares subproblems with increasing sketch sizes, applies PCG as the inner solver, and...
Item Response Theory (IRT) has recently been proposed as a framework for evaluating large language model (LLM) benchmarks by separating a model's latent ability from the properties of individual benchmark items. Existing neural IRT approaches, including PSN-IRT, estimate these quantities using point estimates, limiting uncertainty...
Classical regression approaches, including ordinary least squares, rely on strong assumptions such as constant variance and normality of residuals, which are often violated in real-world data. Although log-transformation is commonly used to stabilise variance, it may introduce re-transformation bias and fail to address...
The issue of model misspecification is critical, yet it is often regarded as unavoidable in applied statistical modeling. Model misspecification can be mitigated by incorporating informative features and strengthening model formulations, such as through the integration of domain knowledge or structural constraints. In this paper, we...
Standard offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms typically assume that the actions in the dataset are observed without error. However, in many real-world applications, the true actions are unobserved and only noisy proxies are available, causing existing RL methods to yield biased and potentially misleading conclusions. We...
Despite the empirical advantages of deep networks over shallow ones, theoretical depth separations largely concern approximation power, while algorithmic results are mostly limited to comparisons between two- and three-layer networks. In this work, we prove the first algorithmic separation between constant-depth and logarithmic-depth...
Lloyd's $K$-means algorithm, also known as naïve $K$-means, is a widely used ad hoc optimization heuristic, designed to minimize the sum of squared errors (SSE) across all $K$-partitions of a dataset via iterative cluster refinement. In this work, we establish a novel connection between Lloyd's algorithm and the Frank-Wolfe (FW)...