Related papers: Approximation by log-concave distributions, with a…

We consider the parameter estimation problem of a probabilistic generative model prescribed using a natural exponential family of distributions. For this problem, the typical maximum likelihood estimator usually overfits under limited…

Distribution alignment has many applications in deep learning, including domain adaptation and unsupervised image-to-image translation. Most prior work on unsupervised distribution alignment relies either on minimizing simple non-parametric…

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…

Sequential change-point detection in non-Gaussian stochastic processes is challenging because the underlying densities are rarely known in real time. Classical parametric procedures such as CUSUM lose optimality under distributional…

Motivated by the computation of the non-parametric maximum likelihood estimator (NPMLE) and the Bayesian posterior in statistics, this paper explores the problem of convex optimization over the space of all probability distributions. We…

We propose an algorithm to sample from composite log-concave distributions over $\mathbb{R}^d$, i.e., densities of the form $\pi\propto e^{-f-g}$, assuming access to gradient evaluations of $f$ and a restricted Gaussian oracle (RGO) for…

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.…

Multi-dimensional distributions whose marginal distributions are uniform are called copulas. Among them, the one that satisfies given constraints on expectation and is closest to the independent distribution in the sense of Kullback-Leibler…

Langevin diffusion is a commonly used tool for sampling from a given distribution. In this work, we establish that when the target density $p^*$ is such that $\log p^*$ is $L$ smooth and $m$ strongly convex, discrete Langevin diffusion…

This work presents an upper-bound to value that the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence can reach for a class of probability distributions called quantum distributions (QD). The aim is to find a distribution $U$ which maximizes the KL…

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…

Robust estimators of location and dispersion are often used in the elliptical model to obtain an uncontaminated and highly representative subsample by trimming the data outside an ellipsoid based in the associated Mahalanobis distance. Here…

We study the problem of sampling from a $d$-dimensional distribution with density $p(x)\propto e^{-f(x)}$, which does not necessarily satisfy good isoperimetric conditions. Specifically, we show that for any $L,M$ satisfying $LM\ge d\ge 5$,…

We propose a closed-form spectral framework for relative log-density estimation in linearly parameterized probabilistic models, including unnormalized and conditional models. This is achieved by representing the Kullback-Leibler (KL)…

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…

Many randomized approximation algorithms operate by giving a procedure for simulating a random variable $X$ which has mean $\mu$ equal to the target answer, and a relative standard deviation bounded above by a known constant $c$. Examples…

Many two-sample problems call for a comparison of two distributions from an exponential family. Density ratio estimation methods provide ways to solve such problems through direct estimation of the differences in natural parameters. 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…

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…

Mixture distributions arise in many application areas, for example as marginal distributions or convolutions of distributions. We present a method of constructing an easily tractable discrete mixture distribution as an approximation to a…