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We study the adaptation properties of the multivariate log-concave maximum likelihood estimator over three subclasses of log-concave densities. The first consists of densities with polyhedral support whose logarithms are piecewise affine.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-10-21 Oliver Y. Feng , Adityanand Guntuboyina , Arlene K. H. Kim , Richard J. Samworth

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 $y\in \mathbb {R}$;…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2012-11-15 Arseni Seregin , Jon A. Wellner

The assumption of log-concavity is a flexible and appealing nonparametric shape constraint in distribution modelling. In this work, we study the log-concave maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of a probability mass function (pmf). We show…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-04-17 Fadoua Balabdaoui , Hanna Jankowski , Kaspar Rufibach , Marios Pavlides

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2010-11-16 Roger Koenker , Ivan Mizera

We propose a method for estimating a log-concave density on $\mathbb R^d$ from samples, under the assumption that there exists an orthogonal transformation that makes the components of the random vector independent. While log-concave…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-12-20 Sharvaj Kubal , Christian Campbell , Elina Robeva

We solve the problem of estimating the distribution of presumed i.i.d. observations for the total variation loss. Our approach is based on density models and is versatile enough to cope with many different ones, including some density…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-01-05 Y. Baraud , H. Halconruy , G. Maillard

Theoretical guarantees are established for a standard estimator in a semi-parametric finite mixture model, where each component density is modeled as a product of univariate densities under a conditional independence assumption. The focus…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-11-07 Marie Du Roy de Chaumaray , Michael Levine , Matthieu Marbac

We study the problem of maximum likelihood estimation of densities that are log-concave and lie in the graphical model corresponding to a given undirected graph $G$. We show that the maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) is the product of the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-12-02 Kaie Kubjas , Olga Kuznetsova , Elina Robeva , Pardis Semnani , Luca Sodomaco

We study a likelihood ratio test for the location of the mode of a log-concave density. Our test is based on comparison of the log-likelihoods corresponding to the unconstrained maximum likelihood estimator of a log-concave density and the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-06-05 Charles R. Doss , Jon A. Wellner

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2011-10-17 Lutz Duembgen , Richard Samworth , Dominic Schuhmacher

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…

Computation · Statistics 2019-02-21 Fabian Rathke , Christoph Schnörr

Phylogenetic trees are key data objects in biology, and the method of phylogenetic reconstruction has been highly developed. The space of phylogenetic trees is a nonpositively curved metric space. Recently, statistical methods to analyze…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-11-23 Yuki Takazawa , Tomonari Sei

In this paper, we study the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of a convex hazard function. We show that the MLE is consistent and converges at a local rate of $n^{2/5}$ at points $x_0$ where the true hazard function is…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2010-01-14 Hanna K. Jankowski , Jon A. Wellner

We establish global rates of convergence for the Maximum Likelihood Estimators (MLEs) of log-concave and $s$-concave densities on $\mathbb{R}$. The main finding is that the rate of convergence of the MLE in the Hellinger metric is no worse…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-09-16 Charles R. Doss , Jon A. Wellner

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-03-15 Min Xu , Richard J. Samworth

The entropy per coordinate in a log-concave random vector of any dimension with given density at the mode is shown to have a range of just 1. Uniform distributions on convex bodies are at the lower end of this range, the distribution with…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Sergey Bobkov , Mokshay Madiman

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…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-12-14 Ilias Diakonikolas , Anastasios Sidiropoulos , Alistair Stewart

We study the {\em robust proper learning} of univariate log-concave distributions (over continuous and discrete domains). Given a set of samples drawn from an unknown target distribution, we want to compute a log-concave hypothesis…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2016-06-10 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Alistair Stewart

Sampling from Gibbs distributions and computing their log-partition function are fundamental tasks in statistics, machine learning, and statistical physics. While efficient algorithms are known for log-concave densities, the worst-case…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-24 David Holzmüller , Francis Bach

In the current paper, the estimation of the probability density function and the cumulative distribution function of the Topp-Leone distribution is considered. We derive the following estimators: maximum likelihood estimator, uniformly…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-01-17 Lazhar Benkhelifa