English

A Distributionally Robust Estimator that Dominates the Empirical Average

Statistics Theory 2024-06-21 v4 Statistics Theory

Abstract

We leverage the duality between risk-averse and distributionally robust optimization (DRO) to devise a distributionally robust estimator that strictly outperforms the empirical average for all probability distributions with negative excess kurtosis. The aforesaid estimator solves the χ2\chi^{2}-robust mean squared error problem in closed form.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2402.10418,
  title  = {A Distributionally Robust Estimator that Dominates the Empirical Average},
  author = {Nikolas Koumpis and Dionysis Kalogerias},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.10418},
  year   = {2024}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T14:50:18.556Z