English

Concentration of Measure for Radial Distributions and Consequences for Statistical Modeling

Statistics Theory 2016-09-13 v2 Statistics Theory

Abstract

Motivated by problems in high-dimensional statistics such as mixture modeling for classification and clustering, we consider the behavior of radial densities as the dimension increases. We establish a form of concentration of measure, and even a convergence in distribution, under additional assumptions. This extends the well-known behavior of the normal distribution (its concentration around the sphere of radius square-root of the dimension) to other radial densities. We draw some possible consequences for statistical modeling in high-dimensions, including a possible universality property of Gaussian mixtures.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1607.07549,
  title  = {Concentration of Measure for Radial Distributions and Consequences for Statistical Modeling},
  author = {Ery Arias-Castro and Xiao Pu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1607.07549},
  year   = {2016}
}