An ensemble approach to determine the number of latent dimensions and assess its reliability
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Determining the number of latent dimensions (LD) of a data set is a ubiquitous problem, for which numerous methods have been developed. We compare some of the most effective ones on synthetic data, which allows proper evaluation given that the true number of LD is known. Results show that their performance is sensitive to data set attributes such as sparsity, number of observations in relation to number of features, and underlying feature distributions. Results also show this sensitivity is different across methods. This observation brings us to devise an ensemble technique to combine LD estimates from multiple methods and achieve an estimate that is more reliable than any single method. We also demonstrate that the variance of the estimates across the single methods is a good indicator of the expected loss of the ensemble-based LD estimate. This observation leads, in turn, to deriving a method for the assessment of the reliability of the estimate. Finally, we discuss the practical implications of the findings.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it