Related papers: Maximum Likelihood Estimation of Functionals of Di…
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 consider estimating the Shannon entropy of a discrete distribution $P$ from $n$ i.i.d. samples. Recently, Jiao, Venkat, Han, and Weissman, and Wu and Yang constructed approximation theoretic estimators that achieve the minimax $L_2$…
Maximum likelihood estimation of linear functionals in the inverse problem of deconvolution is considered. Given observations of a random sample from a distribution $P_0\equiv P_{F_0}$ indexed by a (potentially infinite-dimensional)…
Consider the problem of estimating the Shannon entropy of a distribution over $k$ elements from $n$ independent samples. We show that the minimax mean-square error is within universal multiplicative constant factors of $$\Big(\frac{k }{n…
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…
We investigate the theoretical foundations of a recently introduced entropy-based formulation of weighted least squares for the approximation of overdetermined linear systems, motivated by robust data fitting in the presence of sparse gross…
We analyze the problem of discrete distribution estimation under $\ell_1$ loss. We provide non-asymptotic upper and lower bounds on the maximum risk of the empirical distribution (the maximum likelihood estimator), and the minimax risk in…
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…
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…
A striking result of [Acharya et al. 2017] showed that to estimate symmetric properties of discrete distributions, plugging in the distribution that maximizes the likelihood of observed multiset of frequencies, also known as the profile…
We consider the problem of estimating the $L_1$ distance between two discrete probability measures $P$ and $Q$ from empirical data in a nonasymptotic and large alphabet setting. When $Q$ is known and one obtains $n$ samples from $P$, we…
In many signal detection and classification problems, we have knowledge of the distribution under each hypothesis, but not the prior probabilities. This paper is aimed at providing theory to quantify the performance of detection via…
This paper considers an extension of the multivariate symmetric Laplace distribution to matrix variate case. The symmetric Laplace distribution is a scale mixture of normal distribution. The maximum likelihood estimators (MLE) of the…
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…
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…
Suppose that $\m{U} = (U_1, \ldots , U_d) $ has a Uniform$([0,1]^d)$ distribution, that $\m{Y} = (Y_1 , \ldots , Y_d) $ has the distribution $G$ on $\RR_+^d$, and let $\m{X} = (X_1 , \ldots , X_d) = (U_1 Y_1 , \ldots , U_d Y_d )$. The…
This paper considers the estimation of Shannon entropy for discrete distributions with countably infinite support. While minimax rates for finite-support distributions are established, infinite-support distributions present distinct…
An approximate mean square error (MSE) expression for the performance analysis of implicitly defined estimators of non-random parameters is proposed. An implicitly defined estimator (IDE) declares the minimizer/maximizer of a selected…
Orthogonal group synchronization aims to recover orthogonal group elements from their noisy pairwise measurements. It has found numerous applications including computer vision, imaging science, and community detection. Due to the orthogonal…
A discrete statistical model is a subset of a probability simplex. Its maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) is a retraction from that simplex onto the model. We characterize all models for which this retraction is a rational function. This is…