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Related papers: Inference for the mode of a log-concave density

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The modes of a statistical population are high frequency points around which most of the probability mass is accumulated. For the particular case of circular densities, we address the problem of testing if, given an observed sample of a…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-01-07 Diego Bolón , Rosa M. Crujeiras , Alberto Rodríguez-Casal

We introduce a new smooth estimator of the ROC curve based on log-concave density estimates of the constituent distributions. We show that our estimate is asymptotically equivalent to the empirical ROC curve if the underlying densities are…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-04-17 Kaspar Rufibach

An important theme in recent work in asymptotic geometric analysis is that many classical implications between different types of geometric or functional inequalities can be reversed in the presence of convexity assumptions. In this note,…

Probability · Mathematics 2015-07-22 Elizabeth S. Meckes , Mark W. Meckes

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-09-06 Arlene K. H. Kim , Adityanand Guntuboyina , Richard J. Samworth

It is shown that the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator of a univariate log-concave probability density satisfies desirable consistency properties in the tail regions. Specifically, let $P$ and $f$ denote the true underlying…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-02-02 Didier B. Ryter , Lutz Duembgen

Nonparametric statistics for distribution functions F or densities f=F' under qualitative shape constraints provides an interesting alternative to classical parametric or entirely nonparametric approaches. We contribute to this area by…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-10-31 Lutz Duembgen , Petro Kolesnyk , Ralf A. Wilke

Inference based on the penalized density ratio model is proposed and studied. The model under consideration is specified by assuming that the log--likelihood function of two unknown densities is of some parametric form. The model has been…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2008-07-17 Konstantinos Fokianos

We study the problem of maximum likelihood estimation of densities that are log-concave and lie in the graphical model corresponding to a given undirected graph $G$. We show that the maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) is the product of the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-12-02 Kaie Kubjas , Olga Kuznetsova , Elina Robeva , Pardis Semnani , Luca Sodomaco

We find limiting distributions of the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of a log-concave density, that is, a density of the form $f_0=\exp\varphi_0$ where $\varphi_0$ is a concave function on $\mathbb{R}$. The pointwise…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-04-17 Fadoua Balabdaoui , Kaspar Rufibach , Jon A. Wellner

We investigate quantitative implications of the notion of log-concavity through a probabilistic interpretation. In particular, we derive concentration inequalities, moment and entropy bounds for random variables satisfying a precise degree…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-02-19 Arnaud Marsiglietti , James Melbourne

Quantiles can represent key operational and business metrics, but the computational challenges associated with inference has hampered their adoption in online experimentation. One-sample confidence intervals are trivial to construct;…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-08-02 Evan Miller

Shape-constrained density estimation is an important topic in mathematical statistics. We focus on densities on $\mathbb{R}^d$ that are log-concave, and we study geometric properties of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) for weighted…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-07-25 Elina Robeva , Bernd Sturmfels , Caroline Uhler

We revisit the problem of estimating the center of symmetry $\theta$ of an unknown symmetric density $f$. Although Stone (1975), Van Eden (1970), and Sacks (1975) constructed adaptive estimators of $\theta$ in this model, their estimators…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-11-15 Nilanjana Laha

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…

Estimating density ratios between pairs of intractable data distributions is a core problem in probabilistic modeling, enabling principled comparisons of sample likelihoods under different data-generating processes across conditions and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Egor Antipov , Alessandro Palma , Lorenzo Consoli , Stephan Günnemann , Andrea Dittadi , Fabian J. Theis

In this paper, we study the approximation and estimation of $s$-concave densities via R\'enyi divergence. We first show that the approximation of a probability measure $Q$ by an $s$-concave densities exists and is unique via the procedure…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-10-23 Qiyang Han , Jon A. Wellner

In this article, we revisit the problem of estimating the unknown zero-symmetric distribution in a two-component location mixture model, considered in previous works, now under the assumption that the zero-symmetric distribution has a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-05-09 Fadoua Balabdaoui , Charles R. Doss

We study the adaptation properties of the multivariate log-concave maximum likelihood estimator over three subclasses of log-concave densities. The first consists of densities with polyhedral support whose logarithms are piecewise affine.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-10-21 Oliver Y. Feng , Adityanand Guntuboyina , Arlene K. H. Kim , Richard J. Samworth

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-01-05 Y. Baraud , H. Halconruy , G. Maillard

The entropy per coordinate in a log-concave random vector of any dimension with given density at the mode is shown to have a range of just 1. Uniform distributions on convex bodies are at the lower end of this range, the distribution with…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Sergey Bobkov , Mokshay Madiman