Related papers: Minimax-Optimal Bounds for Detectors Based on Esti…
We consider the problem of estimating functionals of discrete distributions, and focus on tight nonasymptotic analysis of the worst case squared error risk of widely used estimators. We apply concentration inequalities to analyze the random…
We revisit the problem of mean estimation in the Gaussian sequence model with $\ell_p$ constraints for $p \in [0, \infty]$. We demonstrate two phenomena for the behavior of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE), which depend on the noise…
We consider 1-dimensional location estimation, where we estimate a parameter $\lambda$ from $n$ samples $\lambda + \eta_i$, with each $\eta_i$ drawn i.i.d. from a known distribution $f$. For fixed $f$ the maximum-likelihood estimate (MLE)…
Bayesian hypothesis testing and minimax hypothesis testing represent extreme instances of detection in which the prior probabilities of the hypotheses are either completely and precisely known, or are completely unknown. Group minimax, also…
Consider a setting with $N$ independent individuals, each with an unknown parameter, $p_i \in [0, 1]$ drawn from some unknown distribution $P^\star$. After observing the outcomes of $t$ independent Bernoulli trials, i.e., $X_i \sim…
In statistical classification and machine learning, classification error is an important performance measure, which is minimized by the Bayes decision rule. In practice, the unknown true distribution is usually replaced with a model…
We propose a general methodology for the construction and analysis of minimax estimators for a wide class of functionals of finite dimensional parameters, and elaborate on the case of discrete distributions, where the alphabet size $S$ is…
We obtain risk bounds for Empirical Risk Minimizers (ERM) and minmax Median-Of-Means (MOM) estimators based on loss functions that are both Lipschitz and convex. Results for the ERM are derived without assumptions on the outputs and under…
In nonlinear deterministic parameter estimation, the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) is unable to attain the Cramer-Rao lower bound at low and medium signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) due the threshold and ambiguity phenomena. In order to…
We advocate for a practical Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) approach towards designing loss functions for regression and forecasting, as an alternative to the typical approach of direct empirical risk minimization on a specific target…
Error bound conditions (EBC) are properties that characterize the growth of an objective function when a point is moved away from the optimal set. They have recently received increasing attention in the field of optimization for developing…
Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is a statistical method used to estimate the parameters of a probability distribution that best explain the observed data. In the context of text generation, MLE is often used to train generative language…
In this paper, decision theory was used to derive Bayes and minimax decision rules to estimate allelic frequencies and to explore their admissibility. Decision rules with uniformly smallest risk usually do not exist and one approach to…
Machine learning models have traditionally been developed under the assumption that the training and test distributions match exactly. However, recent success in few-shot learning and related problems are encouraging signs that these models…
In this paper, distributed Bayesian detection problems with unknown prior probabilities of hypotheses are considered. The sensors obtain observations which are conditionally dependent across sensors and their probability density functions…
We study Empirical Risk Minimizers (ERM) and Regularized Empirical Risk Minimizers (RERM) for regression problems with convex and $L$-Lipschitz loss functions. We consider a setting where $|\cO|$ malicious outliers contaminate the labels.…
This paper considers batch Reinforcement Learning (RL) with general value function approximation. Our study investigates the minimal assumptions to reliably estimate/minimize Bellman error, and characterizes the generalization performance…
We study the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) in the multivariate deviated model where the data are generated from the density function $(1-\lambda^{\ast})h_{0}(x)+\lambda^{\ast}f(x|\mu^{\ast}, \Sigma^{\ast})$ in which $h_{0}$ is a known…
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…
We study the problem of learning multivariate log-concave densities with respect to a global loss function. We obtain the first upper bound on the sample complexity of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) for a log-concave density on…