Related papers: Quasi-concave density estimation
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…
Statistical inference based on optimal transport offers a different perspective from that of maximum likelihood, and has increasingly gained attention in recent years. In this paper, we study univariate nonparametric shape-constrained…
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…
Constraining the maximum likelihood density estimator to satisfy a sufficiently strong constraint, $\log-$concavity being a common example, has the effect of restoring consistency without requiring additional parameters. Since many results…
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…
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…
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 study nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation of a log-concave density function $f_0$ which is known to satisfy further constraints, where either (a) the mode $m$ of $f_0$ is known, or (b) $f_0$ is known to be symmetric about a fixed…
We consider the non-parametric maximum likelihood estimation in the class of Polya frequency functions of order two, viz. the densities with a concave logarithm. This is a subclass of unimodal densities and fairly rich in general. The NPMLE…
The paper considers nonparametric kernel density/regression estimation from a stochastic optimization point of view. The estimation problem is represented through a family of stochastic optimization problems. Recursive constrained…
In a previous article, a least square regression estimation procedure was proposed: first, we condiser a family of functions and study the properties of an estimator in every unidimensionnal model defined by one of these functions; we then…
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…
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…
Shape constrained densities are encountered in many nonparametric estimation problems. The classes of monotone or convex (and monotone) densities can be viewed as special cases of the classes of k-monotone densities. A density g is said to…
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.…
We study the smoothed log-concave maximum likelihood estimator of a probability distribution on $\mathbb{R}^d$. This is a fully automatic nonparametric density estimator, obtained as a canonical smoothing of the log-concave maximum…
Caffarelli's contraction theorem and the analogous Laplacian result in [arXiv:2411.12109, arXiv:2501.11382] are two examples of how log-Hessian bounds on probability densities yield estimates on the derivative of the corresponding Brenier…
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 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…
We show that the density of $Z=\mathop {\operatorname {argmax}}\{W(t)-t^2\}$, sometimes known as Chernoff's density, is log-concave. We conjecture that Chernoff's density is strongly log-concave or "super-Gaussian", and provide evidence in…