Related papers: Approximation and Estimation of s-Concave Densitie…
We investigate the role of convexity in R\'enyi entropy power inequalities. After proving that a general R\'enyi entropy power inequality in the style of Bobkov-Chistyakov (2015) fails when the R\'enyi parameter $r\in(0,1)$, we show that…
We present theoretical properties of the log-concave maximum likelihood estimator of a density based on an independent and identically distributed sample in $\mathbb{R}^d$. Our study covers both the case where the true underlying density is…
Maximum likelihood estimation of a log-concave probability density is formulated as a convex optimization problem and shown to have an equivalent dual formulation as a constrained maximum Shannon entropy problem. Closely related maximum…
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…
The estimation of a log-concave density on $\mathbb{R}$ is a canonical problem in the area of shape-constrained nonparametric inference. We present a Bayesian nonparametric approach to this problem based on an exponentiated Dirichlet…
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…
The log-concave maximum likelihood estimator of a density on the real line based on a sample of size $n$ is known to attain the minimax optimal rate of convergence of $O(n^{-4/5})$ with respect to, e.g., squared Hellinger distance. In this…
We propose a method for estimating a log-concave density on $\mathbb R^d$ from samples, under the assumption that there exists an orthogonal transformation that makes the components of the random vector independent. While log-concave…
We introduce new shape-constrained classes of distribution functions on R, the bi-$s^*$-concave classes. In parallel to results of D\"umbgen, Kolesnyk, and Wilke (2017) for what they called the class of bi-log-concave distribution…
Let X_1, ..., X_n be independent and identically distributed random vectors with a log-concave (Lebesgue) density f. We first prove that, with probability one, there exists a unique maximum likelihood estimator of f. The use of this…
We study nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation of a log-concave probability density and its distribution and hazard function. Some general properties of these estimators are derived from two characterizations. It is shown that the…
We propose a new approach to deriving quantitative mean field approximations for any probability measure $P$ on $\mathbb{R}^n$ with density proportional to $e^{f(x)}$, for $f$ strongly concave. We bound the mean field approximation for the…
In Statistics, log-concave density estimation is a central problem within the field of nonparametric inference under shape constraints. Despite great progress in recent years on the statistical theory of the canonical estimator, namely the…
Estimating divergences in a consistent way is of great importance in many machine learning tasks. Although this is a fundamental problem in nonparametric statistics, to the best of our knowledge there has been no finite sample exponential…
Uniform sampling over a convex body is a fundamental algorithmic problem, yet the convergence in KL or R\'enyi divergence of most samplers remains poorly understood. In this work, we propose a constrained proximal sampler, a principled and…
A novel computational approach to log-concave density estimation is proposed. Previous approaches utilize the piecewise-affine parametrization of the density induced by the given sample set. The number of parameters as well as non-smooth…
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…
We establish global rates of convergence for the Maximum Likelihood Estimators (MLEs) of log-concave and $s$-concave densities on $\mathbb{R}$. The main finding is that the rate of convergence of the MLE in the Hellinger metric is no worse…
We study the problem of sampling from a distribution $\target$ using the Langevin Monte Carlo algorithm and provide rate of convergences for this algorithm in terms of Wasserstein distance of order $2$. Our result holds as long as the…
We study the quantitative convergence of drift-diffusion PDEs that arise as Wasserstein gradient flows of linearly convex functions over the space of probability measures on ${\mathbb R}^d$. In this setting, the objective is in general not…