Related papers: Maximum likelihood estimation of a log-concave den…
Comparison of two univariate distributions based on independent samples from them is a fundamental problem in statistics, with applications in a wide variety of scientific disciplines. In many situations, we might hypothesize that the two…
In reliability theory and survival analysis, observed data are often weakly dependent and subject to additive measurement errors. Such contamination arises when the underlying data are neither independent nor strongly mixed but instead…
In this paper, we study the approximation and estimation of $s$-concave densities via R\'enyi divergence. We first show that the approximation of a probability measure $Q$ by an $s$-concave densities exists and is unique via the procedure…
We develop and analyze $M$-estimation methods for divergence functionals and the likelihood ratios of two probability distributions. Our method is based on a non-asymptotic variational characterization of $f$-divergences, which allows the…
We consider the branch-length estimation problem on a bifurcating tree: a character evolves along the edges of a binary tree according to a two-state symmetric Markov process, and we seek to recover the edge transition probabilities from…
We consider two nonparametric procedures for estimating a concave distribution function based on data corrupted with additive noise generated by a bounded decreasing density on $(0,\infty)$. For the maximum likelihood (ML) estimator and…
Shape-constrained density estimation is an important topic in mathematical statistics. We focus on densities on $\mathbb{R}^d$ that are log-concave, and we study geometric properties of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) for weighted…
Motivated by studies in biological sciences to detect differentially expressed genes, a semiparametric two-component mixture model with one known component is being studied in this paper. Assuming the density of the unknown component to be…
We propose a new approach to deriving quantitative mean field approximations for any probability measure $P$ on $\mathbb{R}^n$ with density proportional to $e^{f(x)}$, for $f$ strongly concave. We bound the mean field approximation for the…
We study the maximum likelihood estimator of density of $n$ independent observations, under the assumption that it is well approximated by a mixture with a large number of components. The main focus is on statistical properties with respect…
The parameters of the log-logistic distribution are generally estimated based on classical methods such as maximum likelihood estimation, whereas these methods usually result in severe biased estimates when the data contain outliers. In…
Shape constraints yield flexible middle grounds between fully nonparametric and fully parametric approaches to modeling distributions of data. The specific assumption of log-concavity is motivated by applications across economics, survival…
We analyze four different approaches to estimate a multivariate probability density (or the log-density) and its first and second order derivatives. Two methods, local log-likelihood and local Hyv\"arinen score estimation, are in terms of…
In this paper, we propose a maximum smoothed likelihood method to estimate the component density functions of mixture models, in which the mixing proportions are known and may differ among observations. The proposed estimates maximize a…
We study the uniform convergence rate of the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) for the sub-distribution functions in the current status data with competing risks model. It is known that the MLE have $L^2$-norm convergence…
The maximum likelihood estimation of the left-truncated log-logistic distribution with a given truncation point is analyzed in detail from both mathematical and numerical perspectives. These maximum likelihood equations often do not possess…
We investigate the behavior of the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator $\hat{f}_n$ for a decreasing density $f$ near the boundaries of the support of $f$. We establish the limiting distribution of $\hat{f}_n(n^{-\alpha})$, where we…
Sampling from various kinds of distributions is an issue of paramount importance in statistics since it is often the key ingredient for constructing estimators, test procedures or confidence intervals. In many situations, the exact sampling…
Given a sample of independent and identically distributed random variables, a novel nonparametric maximum entropy method is presented to estimate the underlying continuous univariate probability density function (pdf). Estimates are found…
Let $f$ be a nonincreasing function defined on $[0,1]$. Under standard regularity conditions, we derive the asymptotic distribution of the supremum norm of the difference between $f$ and its Grenander-type estimator on sub-intervals of…