Related papers: Estimating a Polya frequency function_2

Probability density estimation is a core problem of statistics and signal processing. Moment methods are an important means of density estimation, but they are generally strongly dependent on the choice of feasible functions, which severely…

We study nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation for two classes of multivariate distributions that imply strong forms of positive dependence; namely log-supermodular (MTP$_2$) distributions and log-$L^\#$-concave (LLC) distributions.…

We study the approximation of arbitrary distributions $P$ on $d$-dimensional space by distributions with log-concave density. Approximation means minimizing a Kullback--Leibler-type functional. We show that such an approximation exists if…

This paper presents a novel approach for pointwise estimation of multivariate density functions on known domains of arbitrary dimensions using nonparametric local polynomial estimators. Our method is highly flexible, as it applies to both…

We consider the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation for the underlying event time based on mixed-case interval-censored data, under a log-concavity assumption on its distribution function. This generalized framework relaxes the…

Consider the nonparametric logistic regression problem. In the logistic regression, we usually consider the maximum likelihood estimator, and the excess risk is the expectation of the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence between the true and…

Introduced by Kiefer and Wolfowitz \cite{KW56}, the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator (NPMLE) is a widely used methodology for learning mixture odels and empirical Bayes estimation. Sidestepping the non-convexity in mixture…

We design a new, fast algorithm for agnostically learning univariate probability distributions whose densities are well approximated by piecewise polynomial functions. Let $f$ be the density function of an arbitrary univariate distribution,…

In this article, we revisit the problem of fitting a mixture model under the assumption that the mixture components are symmetric and log-concave. To this end, we first study the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation (NPMLE) of a…

We estimate the density and its derivatives using a local polynomial approximation to the logarithm of an unknown density $f$. The estimator is guaranteed to be nonnegative and achieves the same optimal rate of convergence in the interior…

Nonparametric density estimation is considered for a discretely observed stationary continuous-time process. For each of three given time sampling procedures either random or deterministic, we establish that histograms and frequency…

The likelihood function is a fundamental component in Bayesian statistics. However, evaluating the likelihood of an observation is computationally intractable in many applications. In this paper, we propose a non-parametric approximation of…

We consider minimizing a function consisting of a quadratic term and a proximable term which is possibly nonconvex and nonsmooth. This problem is also known as scaled proximal operator. Despite its simple form, existing methods suffer from…

The estimation of a log-concave density on $\mathbb{R}$ is a canonical problem in the area of shape-constrained nonparametric inference. We present a Bayesian nonparametric approach to this problem based on an exponentiated Dirichlet…

Consider a real-valued function that can only be observed with stochastic noise at a finite set of design points within a Euclidean space. We wish to determine whether there exists a convex function that goes through the true function…

Estimating symmetric properties of a distribution, e.g. support size, coverage, entropy, distance to uniformity, are among the most fundamental problems in algorithmic statistics. While each of these properties have been studied extensively…

Multivariate, heteroscedastic errors complicate statistical inference in many large-scale denoising problems. Empirical Bayes is attractive in such settings, but standard parametric approaches rest on assumptions about the form of the prior…

We establish the consistency of a nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator for a class of stochastic inverse problems. We proceed by embedding the framework into the general settings of early results of Pfanzagl related to mixtures.

We propose a general methodology for the construction and analysis of minimax estimators for a wide class of functionals of finite dimensional parameters, and elaborate on the case of discrete distributions, where the alphabet size $S$ is…

This paper deals with nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation for Gaussian locally stationary processes. Our nonparametric MLE is constructed by minimizing a frequency domain likelihood over a class of functions. The asymptotic behavior…