Related papers: Challenging the empirical mean and empirical varia…
We present new estimators of the mean of a real valued random variable, based on PAC-Bayesian iterative truncation. We analyze the non-asymptotic minimax properties of the deviations of estimators for distributions having either a bounded…
We discuss the possibilities and limitations of estimating the mean of a real-valued random variable from independent and identically distributed observations from a non-asymptotic point of view. In particular, we define estimators with a…
We survey some of the recent advances in mean estimation and regression function estimation. In particular, we describe sub-Gaussian mean estimators for possibly heavy-tailed data both in the univariate and multivariate settings. We focus…
We present a new quantum algorithm for estimating the mean of a real-valued random variable obtained as the output of a quantum computation. Our estimator achieves a nearly-optimal quadratic speedup over the number of classical i.i.d.…
We consider the problem of mean estimation assuming only finite variance. We study a new class of mean estimators constructed by integrating over random noise applied to a soft-truncated empirical mean estimator. For appropriate choices of…
We study the problem of heavy-tailed mean estimation in settings where the variance of the data-generating distribution does not exist. Concretely, given a sample $\mathbf{X} = \{X_i\}_{i = 1}^n$ from a distribution $\mathcal{D}$ over…
In this paper, we present a new estimator of the mean of a random vector, computed by applying some threshold function to the norm. Non asymptotic dimension-free almost sub-Gaussian bounds are proved under weak moment assumptions, using…
We use bias-reduced estimators of high quantiles, of heavy-tailed distributions, to introduce a new estimator of the mean in the case of infinite second moment. The asymptotic normality of the proposed estimator is established and checked,…
For the important classical problem of inference on a sparse high-dimensional normal mean vector, we propose a novel empirical Bayes model that admits a posterior distribution with desirable properties under mild conditions. In particular,…
We study polynomial time algorithms for estimating the mean of a heavy-tailed multivariate random vector. We assume only that the random vector $X$ has finite mean and covariance. In this setting, the radius of confidence intervals achieved…
Different questions related with analysis of extreme values and outliers arise frequently in practice. To exclude extremal observations and outliers is not a good decision because they contain important information about the observed…
The trimmed mean of $n$ scalar random variables from a distribution $P$ is the variant of the standard sample mean where the $k$ smallest and $k$ largest values in the sample are discarded for some parameter $k$. In this paper, we look at…
We study the problem of estimating the mean of a multivariatedistribution based on independent samples. The main result is the proof of existence of an estimator with a non-asymptotic sub-Gaussian performance for all distributions…
We propose and analyze a new estimator of the covariance matrix that admits strong theoretical guarantees under weak assumptions on the underlying distribution, such as existence of moments of only low order. While estimation of covariance…
This study develops a non-asymptotic Gaussian approximation theory for distributions of M-estimators, which are defined as maximizers of empirical criterion functions. In existing mathematical statistics literature, numerous studies have…
In this paper, we consider the estimation of a mean vector of a multivariate normal population where the mean vector is suspected to be nearly equal to mean vectors of $k-1$ other populations. As an alternative to the preliminary test…
Finite sample bounds on the estimation error of the mean by the empirical mean, uniform over a class of functions, can often be conveniently obtained in terms of Rademacher or Gaussian averages of the class. If a function of n variables has…
The purpose of this paper is to discuss empirical risk minimization when the losses are not necessarily bounded and may have a distribution with heavy tails. In such situations, usual empirical averages may fail to provide reliable…
We revisit the problem of estimating the mean of a real-valued distribution, presenting a novel estimator with sub-Gaussian convergence: intuitively, "our estimator, on any distribution, is as accurate as the sample mean is for the Gaussian…
We derive new and improved non-asymptotic deviation inequalities for the sample average approximation (SAA) of an optimization problem. Our results give strong error probability bounds that are "sub-Gaussian"~even when the randomness of the…