Related papers: Near-Optimal Sample Complexity Bounds for Maximum …
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…
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…
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…
Shape constraints yield flexible middle grounds between fully nonparametric and fully parametric approaches to modeling distributions of data. The specific assumption of log-concavity is motivated by applications across economics, survival…
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…
In contrast to the advances in characterizing the sample complexity for solving Markov decision processes (MDPs), the optimal statistical complexity for solving constrained MDPs (CMDPs) remains unknown. We resolve this question by providing…
The problem of learning threshold functions is a fundamental one in machine learning. Classical learning theory implies sample complexity of $O(\xi^{-1} \log(1/\beta))$ (for generalization error $\xi$ with confidence $1-\beta$). The private…
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…
In this paper, we study sample size thresholds for maximum likelihood estimation for tensor normal models. Given the model parameters and the number of samples, we determine whether, almost surely, (1) the likelihood function is bounded…
In this paper, we study the log-likelihood function and Maximum Likelihood Estimate (MLE) for the matrix normal model for both real and complex models. We describe the exact number of samples needed to achieve (almost surely) three…
We study the {\em robust proper learning} of univariate log-concave distributions (over continuous and discrete domains). Given a set of samples drawn from an unknown target distribution, we want to compute a log-concave hypothesis…
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…
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 smoothed log-concave maximum likelihood estimator of a probability distribution on $\mathbb{R}^d$. This is a fully automatic nonparametric density estimator, obtained as a canonical smoothing of the log-concave maximum…
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…
Phylogenetic trees are key data objects in biology, and the method of phylogenetic reconstruction has been highly developed. The space of phylogenetic trees is a nonpositively curved metric space. Recently, statistical methods to analyze…
We consider the branch-length estimation problem on a bifurcating tree: a character evolves along the edges of a binary tree according to a two-state symmetric Markov process, and we seek to recover the edge transition probabilities from…
It is well known that, under standard regularity conditions, the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) satisfies a central limit theorem and converges in distribution to a Gaussian random variable as the sample size grows. This paper…
We consider the problem of sampling from a strongly log-concave density in $\mathbb{R}^d$, and prove an information theoretic lower bound on the number of stochastic gradient queries of the log density needed. Several popular sampling…
We study the problem of learning general (i.e., not necessarily homogeneous) halfspaces with Random Classification Noise under the Gaussian distribution. We establish nearly-matching algorithmic and Statistical Query (SQ) lower bound…