Related papers: Estimating a Polya frequency function_2
We study the problem of computing the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of multivariate log-concave densities. Our main result is the first computationally efficient algorithm for this problem. In more detail, we give an algorithm that, on…
We study probability density functions that are log-concave. Despite the space of all such densities being infinite-dimensional, the maximum likelihood estimate is the exponential of a piecewise linear function determined by finitely many…
The problem we concentrate on is as follows: given (1) a convex compact set $X$ in ${\mathbb{R}}^n$, an affine mapping $x\mapsto A(x)$, a parametric family $\{p_{\mu}(\cdot)\}$ of probability densities and (2) $N$ i.i.d. observations of the…
The family of log-concave density functions contains various kinds of common probability distributions. Due to the shape restriction, it is possible to find the nonparametric estimate of the density, for example, the nonparametric maximum…
We study estimation of multivariate densities $p$ of the form $p(x)=h(g(x))$ for $x\in \mathbb {R}^d$ and for a fixed monotone function $h$ and an unknown convex function $g$. The canonical example is $h(y)=e^{-y}$ for $y\in \mathbb {R}$;…
This work makes two advances in the study of the (approximate) nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator (NPMLE) for exponential family mixture models. First, we develop a data-compression strategy that reduces the cost of repeated…
We study nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation of a log-concave density function $f_0$ which is known to satisfy further constraints, where either (a) the mode $m$ of $f_0$ is known, or (b) $f_0$ is known to be symmetric about a fixed…
In this paper we study the computation of the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator (NPMLE) in multivariate mixture models. Our first approach discretizes this infinite dimensional convex optimization problem by fixing the support…
We tackle the problem of high-dimensional nonparametric density estimation by taking the class of log-concave densities on $\mathbb{R}^p$ and incorporating within it symmetry assumptions, which facilitate scalable estimation algorithms and…
Maximum likelihood estimation of a log-concave probability density is formulated as a convex optimization problem and shown to have an equivalent dual formulation as a constrained maximum Shannon entropy problem. Closely related maximum…
The log-concave maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) problem answers: for a set of points $X_1,...X_n \in \mathbb R^d$, which log-concave density maximizes their likelihood? We present a characterization of the log-concave MLE that leads to…
We study the Nonparametric Maximum Likelihood Estimator (NPMLE) for estimating Gaussian location mixture densities in $d$-dimensions from independent observations. Unlike usual likelihood-based methods for fitting mixtures, NPMLEs are based…
We study a non-parametric approach to multivariate density estimation. The estimators are piecewise constant density functions supported by binary partitions. The partition of the sample space is learned by maximizing the likelihood of the…
A novel computational approach to log-concave density estimation is proposed. Previous approaches utilize the piecewise-affine parametrization of the density induced by the given sample set. The number of parameters as well as non-smooth…
Penalized likelihood methods are fundamental to ultra-high dimensional variable selection. How high dimensionality such methods can handle remains largely unknown. In this paper, we show that in the context of generalized linear models,…
In Statistics, log-concave density estimation is a central problem within the field of nonparametric inference under shape constraints. Despite great progress in recent years on the statistical theory of the canonical estimator, namely the…
In this paper we introduce a method for nonparametric density estimation on geometric networks. We define fused density estimators as solutions to a total variation regularized maximum-likelihood density estimation problem. We provide…
The empirical Bayes $g$-modeling approach via the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator (NPMLE) is widely used for large-scale estimation and inference in the normal means problem, yet theoretical guarantees for uncertainty…
We show how to compute any symmetric Boolean function on $n$ variables over any field (as well as the integers) with a probabilistic polynomial of degree $O(\sqrt{n \log(1/\epsilon)})$ and error at most $\epsilon$. The degree dependence on…
We study the problem of learning multivariate log-concave densities with respect to a global loss function. We obtain the first upper bound on the sample complexity of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) for a log-concave density on…