Related papers: Maximum likelihood geometry in the presence of dat…
Maximum pseudolikelihood (MPL) estimators are useful alternatives to maximum likelihood (ML) estimators when likelihood functions are more difficult to manipulate than their marginal and conditional components. Furthermore, MPL estimators…
We study probability density functions that are log-concave. Despite the space of all such densities being infinite-dimensional, the maximum likelihood estimate is the exponential of a piecewise linear function determined by finitely many…
In this paper, we study sample size thresholds for maximum likelihood estimation for tensor normal models. Given the model parameters and the number of samples, we determine whether, almost surely, (1) the likelihood function is bounded…
Inference is typically intractable in high-treewidth undirected graphical models, making maximum likelihood learning a challenge. One way to overcome this is to restrict parameters to a tractable set, most typically the set of…
We investigate the problem of semi-parametric maximum likelihood under constraints on summary statistics. Such a procedure results in a discrete probability distribution that maximises the likelihood among all such distributions under the…
Every student in statistics or data science learns early on that when the sample size largely exceeds the number of variables, fitting a logistic model produces estimates that are approximately unbiased. Every student also learns that there…
The $\Delta_3(L)$ statistic of Random Matrix Theory is defined as the average of a set of random numbers $\{\delta\}$, derived from a spectrum. The distribution $p(\delta)$ of these random numbers is used as the basis of a maximum…
Deep latent variable models (DLVMs) combine the approximation abilities of deep neural networks and the statistical foundations of generative models. Variational methods are commonly used for inference; however, the exact likelihood of…
Determinantal point processes (DPPs) have wide-ranging applications in machine learning, where they are used to enforce the notion of diversity in subset selection problems. Many estimators have been proposed, but surprisingly the basic…
For a multinomial distribution, suppose that we have prior knowledge of the sum of the probabilities of some categories. This allows us to construct a submodel in a full (i.e., no-restriction) model. Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE)…
Maximum likelihood is the most widely used statistical estimation technique. Recent work by the authors introduced a general methodology for the construction of estimators for functionals in parametric models, and demonstrated improvements…
This paper considers the problem of estimating a power-law degree distribution of an undirected network using sampled data. Although power-law degree distributions are ubiquitous in nature, the widely used parametric methods for estimating…
We propose an efficient algorithm for approximate computation of the profile maximum likelihood (PML), a variant of maximum likelihood maximizing the probability of observing a sufficient statistic rather than the empirical sample. The PML…
Estimating a constrained relation is a fundamental problem in machine learning. Special cases are classification (the problem of estimating a map from a set of to-be-classified elements to a set of labels), clustering (the problem of…
We study the maximum likelihood degree of linear concentration models in algebraic statistics. We relate the geometry of the reciprocal variety to that of semidefinite programming. We show that the Zariski closure in the Grassmanian of the…
We consider the problem of sensitivity of threshold risk, defined as the probability of a function of a random variable falling below a specified threshold level $\delta >0.$ We demonstrate that for polynomial and rational functions of that…
We consider equations of the form $\Delta u +\lambda^2 V(x)e^{\,u}=\rho$ in various two dimensional settings. We assume that $V>0$ is a given function, $\lambda>0$ is a small parameter and $\rho=\mathcal O(1)$ or $\rho\to +\infty$ as…
Given a class of graphs G closed under taking minors, we study the maximum degree \Delta_n of random graphs from G with n vertices. We prove several lower and upper bounds that hold with high probability. Among other results, we find…
A fundamental problem with nonlinear models is that maximum likelihood estimates are not guaranteed to exist. Though nonexistence is a well known problem in the binary response model literature, it presents significant challenges for other…
The $\boldsymbol{\beta}$-model for random graphs is commonly used for representing pairwise interactions in a network with degree heterogeneity. Going beyond pairwise interactions, Stasi et al. (2014) introduced the hypergraph…