Related papers: Challenging the empirical mean and empirical varia…
The use of expectiles in risk management has recently gathered remarkable momentum due to their excellent axiomatic and probabilistic properties. In particular, the class of elicitable law-invariant coherent risk measures only consists of…
The sample mean is often used to aggregate different unbiased estimates of a parameter, producing a final estimate that is unbiased but possibly high-variance. This paper introduces the Bayesian median of means, an aggregation rule that…
The masses of data now available have opened up the prospect of discovering weak signals using machine-learning algorithms, with a view to predictive or interpretation tasks. As this survey of recent results attempts to show, bringing…
We consider the problem of estimating the means $\mu_i$ of $n$ random variables $Y_i \sim N(\mu_i,1)$, $i=1,\ldots ,n$. Assuming some structure on the $\mu$ process, e.g., a state space model, one may use a summary statistics for the…
In experimental design, we are given a large collection of vectors, each with a hidden response value that we assume derives from an underlying linear model, and we wish to pick a small subset of the vectors such that querying the…
Chebyshev's inequality provides an upper bound on the tail probability of a random variable based on its mean and variance. While tight, the inequality has been criticized for only being attained by pathological distributions that abuse the…
Percentiles and more generally, quantiles are commonly used in various contexts to summarize data. For most distributions, there is exactly one quantile that is unbiased. For distributions like the Gaussian that have the same mean and…
We consider estimation of a sparse parameter vector that determines the covariance matrix of a Gaussian random vector via a sparse expansion into known "basis matrices". Using the theory of reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces, we derive lower…
A fundamental problem in statistics is estimating the shape matrix of an Elliptical distribution. This generalizes the familiar problem of Gaussian covariance estimation, for which the sample covariance achieves optimal estimation error.…
We study the problem of using i.i.d. samples from an unknown multivariate probability distribution $p$ to estimate the mutual information of $p$. This problem has recently received attention in two settings: (1) where $p$ is assumed to be…
In this paper, we study the performance of extremum estimators from the perspective of generalization ability (GA): the ability of a model to predict outcomes in new samples from the same population. By adapting the classical concentration…
Mutual information is a general statistical dependency measure which has found applications in representation learning, causality, domain generalization and computational biology. However, mutual information estimators are typically…
In this paper, tight upper and lower bounds are derived on the weighted sum of minimum mean-squared errors for additive Gaussian noise channels. The bounds are obtained by constraining the input distribution to be close to a Gaussian…
As the most fundamental problem in statistics, robust location estimation has many prominent solutions, such as the trimmed mean, Winsorized mean, Hodges Lehmann estimator, Huber M estimator, and median of means. Recent studies suggest that…
This paper proposes a Bayesian method for estimating the parameters of a normal distribution when only limited summary statistics (sample mean, minimum, maximum, and sample size) are available. To estimate the parameters of a normal…
This paper provides a general technique for lower bounding the Bayes risk of statistical estimation, applicable to arbitrary loss functions and arbitrary prior distributions. A lower bound on the Bayes risk not only serves as a lower bound…
In this paper, we consider asymptotics of the optimal value and the optimal solutions of parametric minimax estimation problems. Specifically, we consider estimators of the optimal value and the optimal solutions in a sample minimax problem…
It is a common phenomenon that for high-dimensional and nonparametric statistical models, rate-optimal estimators balance squared bias and variance. Although this balancing is widely observed, little is known whether methods exist that…
We consider the problems of confidence estimation and hypothesis testing on a parameter of signal observed in Gaussian white noise. For these problems we point out lower bounds of asymptotic efficiency in the zone of moderate deviation…
Explaining how overparametrized neural networks simultaneously achieve low risk and zero empirical risk on benchmark datasets is an open problem. PAC-Bayes bounds optimized using variational inference (VI) have been recently proposed as a…