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We provide an efficient unified plug-in approach for estimating symmetric properties of distributions given $n$ independent samples. Our estimator is based on profile-maximum-likelihood (PML) and is sample optimal for estimating various…
Estimating symmetric properties of a distribution, e.g. support size, coverage, entropy, distance to uniformity, are among the most fundamental problems in algorithmic statistics. While each of these properties have been studied extensively…
The advent of data science has spurred interest in estimating properties of distributions over large alphabets. Fundamental symmetric properties such as support size, support coverage, entropy, and proximity to uniformity, received most…
In this paper we investigate the performance of a variety of estimation techniques for the scale and shape parameter of the Lomax distribution. These methods include traditional methods such as the maximum likelihood estimator and the…
We address the estimation problem for general finite mixture models, with a particular focus on the elliptical mixture models (EMMs). Compared to the widely adopted Kullback-Leibler divergence, we show that the Wasserstein distance provides…
When a population exhibits heterogeneity, we often model it via a finite mixture: decompose it into several different but homogeneous subpopulations. Contemporary practice favors learning the mixtures by maximizing the likelihood for…
This paper introduces a direct differentiation-based framework that unifies the derivation of influence functions across parametric, nonparametric, and semiparametric models. We show that the Riesz representer of the functional derivative…
This paper proposes a novel exact maximum likelihood (ML) estimation method for general Gaussian processes, where all parameters are estimated jointly. The exact ML estimator (MLE) is consistent and asymptotically normally distributed. We…
We revisit the question of characterizing the convergence rate of plug-in estimators of optimal transport costs. It is well known that an empirical measure comprising independent samples from an absolutely continuous distribution on…
In this paper, we develop a multi-step estimation procedure to simultaneously estimate the varying-coefficient functions using a local-linear generalized method of moments (GMM) based on continuous moment conditions. To incorporate spatial…
Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimators in their various forms, including the popular Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimator, are frequently applied for the evaluation of complex econometric models with not analytically computable moment…
We propose a new length formula that governs the iterates of the momentum method when minimizing differentiable semialgebraic functions with locally Lipschitz gradients. It enables us to establish local convergence, global convergence, and…
We revisit the classical problem of deriving convergence rates for the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) in finite mixture models. The Wasserstein distance has become a standard loss function for the analysis of parameter estimation in…
This paper deals with the problem of estimating the level sets $L(c)= \{F(x) \geq c \}$, with $c \in (0,1)$, of an unknown distribution function $F$ on \mathbb{R}^d_+$. A plug-in approach is followed. That is, given a consistent estimator…
In this paper we provide a new efficient algorithm for approximately computing the profile maximum likelihood (PML) distribution, a prominent quantity in symmetric property estimation. We provide an algorithm which matches the previous best…
We introduce the Locally Linear Latent Variable Model (LL-LVM), a probabilistic model for non-linear manifold discovery that describes a joint distribution over observations, their manifold coordinates and locally linear maps conditioned on…
Gaussian mixture models (GMM) are powerful parametric tools with many applications in machine learning and computer vision. Expectation maximization (EM) is the most popular algorithm for estimating the GMM parameters. However, EM…
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 propose a new minimum-distance estimator for linear random coefficient models. This estimator integrates the recently advanced sliced Wasserstein distance with the nearest neighbor methods, both of which enhance computational efficiency.…
Finite mixture models have long been used across a variety of fields in engineering and sciences. Recently there has been a great deal of interest in quantifying the convergence behavior of the \emph{mixing measure}, a fundamental object…