On the tails of log-concave density estimators
Statistics Theory
2026-02-02 v3 Statistics Theory
Abstract
It is shown that the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator of a univariate log-concave probability density satisfies desirable consistency properties in the tail regions. Specifically, let and denote the true underlying distribution and density, respectively. If is the estimated log-concave density, and , then we specify sequences such that at a specific speed, ensuring that the absolute errors or absolute relative errors of and converge to zero uniformly on sets . The main tools, besides characterizations of , are exponential and maximal inequalities for truncated moments of log-concave distributions, which are of independent interest.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2409.17910,
title = {On the tails of log-concave density estimators},
author = {Didier B. Ryter and Lutz Duembgen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.17910},
year = {2026}
}