Related papers: Minimax Estimation of the $L_1$ Distance
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…
The problem of estimating the Kullback-Leibler divergence $D(P\|Q)$ between two unknown distributions $P$ and $Q$ is studied, under the assumption that the alphabet size $k$ of the distributions can scale to infinity. The estimation is…
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…
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…
We consider the problem of estimating the optimal transport map between two probability distributions, $P$ and $Q$ in $\mathbb R^d$, on the basis of i.i.d. samples. All existing statistical analyses of this problem require the assumption…
We study the fundamental problem of estimating an unknown discrete distribution $p$ over $d$ symbols, given $n$ i.i.d. samples from the distribution. We are interested in minimizing the KL divergence between the true distribution and the…
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., $X_i \sim…
A common way to discretize a probability measure is to use an empirical measure as a discrete approximation. But how far from being optimal is this approximation in the p-Wasserstein distance? In this paper, we study this question in two…
In this paper, the maximum L$q$-likelihood estimator (ML$q$E), a new parameter estimator based on nonextensive entropy [Kibernetika 3 (1967) 30--35] is introduced. The properties of the ML$q$E are studied via asymptotic analysis and…
We give a general unified method that can be used for $L_1$ {\em closeness testing} of a wide range of univariate structured distribution families. More specifically, we design a sample optimal and computationally efficient algorithm for…
We study the minimax estimation of $\alpha$-divergences between discrete distributions for integer $\alpha\ge 1$, which include the Kullback--Leibler divergence and the $\chi^2$-divergences as special examples. Dropping the usual…
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 $L_2$…
We study the question of closeness testing for two discrete distributions. More precisely, given samples from two distributions $p$ and $q$ over an $n$-element set, we wish to distinguish whether $p=q$ versus $p$ is at least $\eps$-far from…
We consider the closeness testing problem for discrete distributions. The goal is to distinguish whether two samples are drawn from the same unspecified distribution, or whether their respective distributions are separated in $L_1$-norm. In…
We study the minimax optimal rates for estimating a range of Integral Probability Metrics (IPMs) between two unknown probability measures, based on $n$ independent samples from them. Curiously, we show that estimating the IPM itself between…
We define two minimum distance estimators for dependent data by minimizing some approximated Maximum Mean Discrepancy distances between the true empirical distribution of observations and their assumed (parametric) model distribution. When…
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…
Finite precision approximations of discrete probability distributions are considered, applicable for distribution synthesis, e.g., probabilistic shaping. Two algorithms are presented that find the optimal $M$-type approximation $Q$ of a…
In this paper we develop rate--optimal estimation procedures in the problem of estimating the $L_p$--norm, $p\in (0, \infty)$ of a probability density from independent observations. The density is assumed to be defined on $R^d$, $d\geq 1$…
Analyzing the Markov decision process (MDP) with continuous state spaces is generally challenging. A recent interesting work \cite{shah2018q} solves MDP with bounded continuous state space by a nearest neighbor $Q$ learning approach, which…