English
Related papers

Related papers: Minimax Estimation of Discrete Distributions under…

200 papers

We investigate the high-probability estimation of discrete distributions from an \iid sample under $\chi^2$-divergence loss. Although the minimax risk in expectation is well understood, its high-probability counterpart remains largely…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-10-30 Sirine Louati

We study the problem of estimating a distribution over a finite alphabet from an i.i.d. sample, with accuracy measured in relative entropy (Kullback-Leibler divergence). While optimal bounds on the expected risk are known, high-probability…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-02-27 Jaouad Mourtada

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…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2015-03-11 Jiantao Jiao , Kartik Venkat , Yanjun Han , Tsachy Weissman

We study and compare three estimators of a discrete monotone distribution: (a) the (raw) empirical estimator; (b) the "method of rearrangements" estimator; and (c) the maximum likelihood estimator. We show that the maximum likelihood…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2009-10-20 Hanna K. Jankowski , Jon A. Wellner

We present a novel approach to estimating discrete distributions with (potentially) infinite support in the total variation metric. In a departure from the established paradigm, we make no structural assumptions whatsoever on the sampling…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-10-16 Doron Cohen , Aryeh Kontorovich , Geoffrey Wolfer

Local asymptotic minimax risk bounds in a locally asymptotically mixture of normal family of distributions have been investigated under asymmetric loss functions and the asymptotic distribution of the optimal estimator that attains the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2008-12-02 Debasis Bhattacharya , A. K. Basu

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…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2017-08-11 Jiantao Jiao , Kartik Venkat , Yanjun Han , Tsachy Weissman

We consider the problem of estimating a $d$-dimensional discrete distribution from its samples observed under a $b$-bit communication constraint. In contrast to most previous results that largely focus on the global minimax error, we study…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Wei-Ning Chen , Peter Kairouz , Ayfer Özgür

We consider the minimax estimation problem of a discrete distribution with support size $k$ under locally differential privacy constraints. A privatization scheme is applied to each raw sample independently, and we need to estimate the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-10-18 Min Ye , Alexander Barg

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-06-26 Jiantao Jiao , Yanjun Han , Tsachy Weissman

We consider the fundamental problem of estimating a discrete distribution on a domain of size $K$ with high probability in Kullback-Leibler divergence. We provide upper and lower bounds on the minimax estimation rate, which show that the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-23 Dirk van der Hoeven , Julia Olkhovskaia , Tim van Erven

We study statistical estimation under local differential privacy (LDP) when users may hold heterogeneous privacy levels and accuracy must be guaranteed with high probability. Departing from the common in-expectation analyses, and for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-15 Maryam Aliakbarpour , Alireza Fallah , Swaha Roy , Ria Stevens

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-12-03 Octavio César Mesner

M-estimation, aka empirical risk minimization, is at the heart of statistics and machine learning: Classification, regression, location estimation, etc. Asymptotic theory is well understood when the loss satisfies some smoothness…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-12-16 Victor-Emmanuel Brunel

For a regression model, we consider the risk of the maximum likelihood estimator with respect to $\alpha$-divergence, which includes the special cases of Kullback-Leibler divergence, Hellinger distance and $\chi^2$ divergence. The…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-09-12 Yo Sheena

Consider the communication-constrained estimation of discrete distributions under $\ell^p$ losses, where each distributed terminal holds multiple independent samples and uses limited number of bits to describe the samples. We obtain the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Deheng Yuan , Tao Guo , Zhongyi Huang

We study the fundamental task of estimating the median of an underlying distribution from a finite number of samples, under pure differential privacy constraints. We focus on distributions satisfying the minimal assumption that they have a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-11-13 Christos Tzamos , Emmanouil-Vasileios Vlatakis-Gkaragkounis , Ilias Zadik

We consider the minimax estimation problem of a discrete distribution with support size $k$ under locally differential privacy constraints. A privatization scheme is applied to each raw sample independently, and we need to estimate the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-08-02 Min Ye , Alexander Barg

We study robust linear regression in high-dimension, when both the dimension $d$ and the number of data points $n$ diverge with a fixed ratio $\alpha=n/d$, and study a data model that includes outliers. We provide exact asymptotics for the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-24 Matteo Vilucchio , Emanuele Troiani , Vittorio Erba , Florent Krzakala

We present novel bounds for estimating discrete probability distributions under the $\ell_\infty$ norm. These are nearly optimal in various precise senses, including a kind of instance-optimality. Our data-dependent convergence guarantees…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-02-14 Aryeh Kontorovich , Amichai Painsky
‹ Prev 1 2 3 10 Next ›