Related papers: Smoothed log-concave maximum likelihood estimation…
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…
In the context of a species sampling problem we discuss a non-parametric maximum likelihood estimator for the underlying probability mass function. The estimator is known in the computer science literature as the high profile estimator. We…
Nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation is intended to infer the unknown density distribution while making as few assumptions as possible. To alleviate the over parameterization in nonparametric data fitting, smoothing assumptions are…
We develop an active set algorithm for the maximum likelihood estimation of a log-concave density based on complete data. Building on this fast algorithm, we indidate an EM algorithm to treat arbitrarily censored or binned data.
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…
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…
In this article, we study the problem of sampling from distributions whose densities are not necessarily smooth nor logconcave. We propose a simple Langevin-based algorithm that does not rely on popular but computationally challenging…
In this paper we introduce a new family of estimators for the parameters of shape and scale of the log-logistic distribution being robust when rank set sample method is used to select the data. Rank set sampling arises as a way to reduce…
We consider the problem of estimating the joint distribution function of the event time and a continuous mark variable based on censored data. More specifically, the event time is subject to current status censoring and the continuous mark…
In this article, we revisit the problem of fitting a mixture model under the assumption that the mixture components are symmetric and log-concave. To this end, we first study the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation (NPMLE) of a…
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…
Sampling from Gibbs distributions and computing their log-partition function are fundamental tasks in statistics, machine learning, and statistical physics. While efficient algorithms are known for log-concave densities, the worst-case…
We consider the problem of estimating a regularization parameter, or a shrinkage coefficient $\alpha \in (0,1)$ for Regularized Tyler's M-estimator (RTME). In particular, we propose to estimate an optimal shrinkage coefficient by setting…
Given a convex function $f\colon\mathbb{R}^{d}\to\mathbb{R}$, the problem of sampling from a distribution $\propto e^{-f(x)}$ is called log-concave sampling. This task has wide applications in machine learning, physics, statistics, etc. In…
Standard variational lower bounds used to train latent variable models produce biased estimates of most quantities of interest. We introduce an unbiased estimator of the log marginal likelihood and its gradients for latent variable models…
We initiate the study of smoothed analysis for the sequential probability assignment problem with contexts. We study information-theoretically optimal minmax rates as well as a framework for algorithmic reduction involving the maximum…
This paper presents a detailed theoretical analysis of the Langevin Monte Carlo sampling algorithm recently introduced in Durmus et al. (Efficient Bayesian computation by proximal Markov chain Monte Carlo: when Langevin meets Moreau, 2016)…
We study maximum likelihood estimation in log-linear models under conditional Poisson sampling schemes. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for existence of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of the model parameters and…
We study the problem of approximate sampling from non-log-concave distributions, e.g., Gaussian mixtures, which is often challenging even in low dimensions due to their multimodality. We focus on performing this task via Markov chain Monte…
In this paper, we study the problem of sampling from a given probability density function that is known to be smooth and strongly log-concave. We analyze several methods of approximate sampling based on discretizations of the (highly…