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The problem of estimating the Kullback-Leibler divergence $D(P\|Q)$ between two unknown distributions $P$ and $Q$ is studied, under the assumption that the alphabet size $k$ of the distributions can scale to infinity. The estimation is…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2018-02-22 Yuheng Bu , Shaofeng Zou , Yingbin Liang , Venugopal V. Veeravalli

The estimation of a log-concave density on $\mathbb{R}^d$ represents a central problem in the area of nonparametric inference under shape constraints. In this paper, we study the performance of log-concave density estimators with respect to…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-09-29 Arlene K. H. Kim , Richard J. Samworth

We study nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation of a log-concave probability density and its distribution and hazard function. Some general properties of these estimators are derived from two characterizations. It is shown that the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-04-17 Lutz Duembgen , Kaspar Rufibach

We recently proposed a general algorithm for approximating nonstandard Bayesian posterior distributions by minimization of their Kullback-Leibler divergence with respect to a more convenient approximating distribution. In this note we offer…

Computation · Statistics 2014-01-10 Tim Salimans

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-10-23 Qiyang Han , Jon A. Wellner

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…

Probability · Mathematics 2022-06-06 Daniel Lacker , Sumit Mukherjee , Lane Chun Yeung

We provide guarantees for approximate Gaussian Process (GP) regression resulting from two common low-rank kernel approximations: based on random Fourier features, and based on truncating the kernel's Mercer expansion. In particular, we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-22 Constantinos Daskalakis , Petros Dellaportas , Aristeidis Panos

We provide guarantees for approximate Gaussian Process (GP) regression resulting from two common low-rank kernel approximations: based on random Fourier features, and based on truncating the kernel's Mercer expansion. In particular, we…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-12-16 Constantinos Daskalakis , Petros Dellaportas , Aristeidis Panos

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…

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

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

We provide full theoretical guarantees for the convergence behaviour of diffusion-based generative models under the assumption of strongly log-concave data distributions while our approximating class of functions used for score estimation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Stefano Bruno , Ying Zhang , Dong-Young Lim , Ömer Deniz Akyildiz , Sotirios Sabanis

This paper deals with a method for the approximation of a spectral density function among the solutions of a generalized moment problem a` la Byrnes/Georgiou/Lindquist. The approximation is pursued with respect to the Kullback-Leibler…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2009-11-04 Augusto Ferrante , Federico Ramponi , Francesco Ticozzi

We study Gaussian approximations to the distribution of a diffusion. The approximations are easy to compute: they are defined by two simple ordinary differential equations for the mean and the covariance. Time correlations can also be…

Probability · Mathematics 2016-05-20 Daniel Sanz-Alonso , Andrew M. Stuart

We study the problem of model selection type aggregation with respect to the Kullback-Leibler divergence for various probabilistic models. Rather than considering a convex combination of the initial estimators $f_1, \ldots, f_N$, our…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-01-22 Cristina Butucea , Jean-François Delmas , Anne Dutfoy , Richard Fischer

We study the Kullback--Leibler (KL) divergence approximation theory of Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) by isolating an abstract mechanism behind several necessary-and-sufficient statements. The necessity direction is universal: if a density…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-04-14 Hien Duy Nguyen

A loss function measures the discrepancy between the true values (observations) and their estimated fits, for a given instance of data. A loss function is said to be proper (unbiased, Fisher consistent) if the fits are defined over a unit…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2018-05-11 Amichai Painsky , Gregory W. Wornell

We study the problem of estimating a distribution over a finite alphabet from an i.i.d. sample, with accuracy measured in relative entropy (Kullback-Leibler divergence). While optimal bounds on the expected risk are known, high-probability…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-02-27 Jaouad Mourtada

When and why representations learned by different deep neural networks are similar is an active research topic. We choose to address these questions from the perspective of identifiability theory, which suggests that a measure of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Beatrix M. G. Nielsen , Emanuele Marconato , Andrea Dittadi , Luigi Gresele

Recent work has attempted to directly approximate the `function-space' or predictive posterior distribution of Bayesian models, without approximating the posterior distribution over the parameters. This is appealing in e.g. Bayesian neural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-19 David R. Burt , Sebastian W. Ober , Adrià Garriga-Alonso , Mark van der Wilk