English

On maximum-likelihood estimation in the all-or-nothing regime

Information Theory 2021-01-26 v1 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning math.IT

Abstract

We study the problem of estimating a rank-1 additive deformation of a Gaussian tensor according to the \emph{maximum-likelihood estimator} (MLE). The analysis is carried out in the sparse setting, where the underlying signal has a support that scales sublinearly with the total number of dimensions. We show that for Bernoulli distributed signals, the MLE undergoes an \emph{all-or-nothing} (AoN) phase transition, already established for the minimum mean-square-error estimator (MMSE) in the same problem. The result follows from two main technical points: (i) the connection established between the MLE and the MMSE, using the first and second-moment methods in the constrained signal space, (ii) a recovery regime for the MMSE stricter than the simple error vanishing characterization given in the standard AoN, that is here proved as a general result.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2101.09994,
  title  = {On maximum-likelihood estimation in the all-or-nothing regime},
  author = {Luca Corinzia and Paolo Penna and Wojciech Szpankowski and Joachim M. Buhmann},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.09994},
  year   = {2021}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T22:29:11.589Z