Related papers: On consistent estimation of the missing mass
For many important problems the quantity of interest is an unknown function of the parameters, which is a random vector with known statistics. Since the dependence of the output on this random vector is unknown, the challenge is to identify…
Quantifying convergence and sufficient sampling of macromolecular molecular dynamics simulations is more often than not a source of controversy (and of various ad hoc solutions) in the field. Clearly, the only reasonable, consistent and…
Parton distribution functions (PDFs) form an essential part of particle physics calculations. Currently, the most precise predictions for these non-perturbative functions are generated through fits to global data. A problem that several PDF…
We consider the problem of goodness-of-fit testing for a model that has at least one unknown parameter that cannot be eliminated by transformation. Examples of such problems can be as simple as testing whether a sample consists of…
The proportion of false null hypotheses is a very important quantity in statistical modelling and inference based on the two-component mixture model and its extensions, and in control and estimation of the false discovery rate and false…
We revisit the problem of estimating the mean of a real-valued distribution, presenting a novel estimator with sub-Gaussian convergence: intuitively, "our estimator, on any distribution, is as accurate as the sample mean is for the Gaussian…
We study the problem of estimating the score function of an unknown probability distribution $\rho^*$ from $n$ independent and identically distributed observations in $d$ dimensions. Assuming that $\rho^*$ is subgaussian and has a…
Consider the Gaussian sequence model under the additional assumption that a fixed fraction of the means is known. We study the problem of variance estimation from a frequentist Bayesian perspective. The maximum likelihood estimator (MLE)…
Approximating the solution of the nonlinear filtering problem with Gaussian mixtures has been a very popular method since the 1970s. However, the vast majority of such approximations are introduced in an ad-hoc manner without theoretical…
A nonparametric Bayes approach is proposed for the problem of estimating a sparse sequence based on Gaussian random variables. We adopt the popular two-group prior with one component being a point mass at zero, and the other component being…
The most fundamental problem in statistics is the inference of an unknown probability distribution from a finite number of samples. For a specific observed data set, answers to the following questions would be desirable: (1) Estimation:…
We study full Bayesian procedures for sparse linear regression when errors have a symmetric but otherwise unknown distribution. The unknown error distribution is endowed with a symmetrized Dirichlet process mixture of Gaussians. For the…
An infinite urn scheme is defined by a probability mass function $(p_j)_{j\geq1}$ over positive integers. A random allocation consists of a sample of $N$ independent drawings according to this probability distribution where $N$ may be…
Given $n$ samples from a population of individuals belonging to different species, what is the number $U$ of hitherto unseen species that would be observed if $\lambda n$ new samples were collected? This is an important problem in many…
We study the problem of estimating the parameters of a Gaussian distribution when samples are only shown if they fall in some (unknown) subset $S \subseteq \R^d$. This core problem in truncated statistics has long history going back to…
We provide an algorithm for properly learning mixtures of two single-dimensional Gaussians without any separability assumptions. Given $\tilde{O}(1/\varepsilon^2)$ samples from an unknown mixture, our algorithm outputs a mixture that is…
Missing values are ubiquitous in (data) science, with potential detrimental consequences for any statistical analysis. As a consequence, a wealth of methods and theoretical results have been developed in recent years. Still, many questions…
We study the sparse high-dimensional Gaussian mixture model when the number of clusters is allowed to grow with the sample size. A minimax lower bound for parameter estimation is established, and we show that a constrained maximum…
An important estimation problem that is closely related to large-scale multiple testing is that of estimating the null density and the proportion of nonnull effects. A few estimators have been introduced in the literature; however, several…
There are many different proposed procedures for sample size planning for the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test at given type-I and type-II error rates $\alpha$ and $\beta$, respectively. Most methods assume very specific models or types of data…