Related papers: A note on breaking ties among sample medians
The sample median is often used in statistical analyses of physical or astronomical data wherein a central value must be found from samples polluted by elements which do not belong to the population of interest or when the underlying…
Percentiles and more generally, quantiles are commonly used in various contexts to summarize data. For most distributions, there is exactly one quantile that is unbiased. For distributions like the Gaussian that have the same mean and…
We consider the problem of estimating the common mean of independently sampled data, where samples are drawn in a possibly non-identical manner from symmetric, unimodal distributions with a common mean. This generalizes the setting of…
The sample mean is often used to aggregate different unbiased estimates of a parameter, producing a final estimate that is unbiased but possibly high-variance. This paper introduces the Bayesian median of means, an aggregation rule that…
In the setting of entangled single-sample distributions, the goal is to estimate some common parameter shared by a family of $n$ distributions, given one single sample from each distribution. This paper studies mean estimation for entangled…
In the setting of entangled single-sample distributions, the goal is to estimate some common parameter shared by a family of distributions, given one \emph{single} sample from each distribution. We study mean estimation and linear…
For a sample of Exponentially distributed durations we aim at point estimation and a confidence interval for its parameter. A duration is only observed if it has ended within a certain time interval, determined by a Uniform distribution.…
The trimmed mean of $n$ scalar random variables from a distribution $P$ is the variant of the standard sample mean where the $k$ smallest and $k$ largest values in the sample are discarded for some parameter $k$. In this paper, we look at…
It is well understood that if one is given a set $X \subset [0,1]$ of $n$ independent uniformly distributed random variables, then $$ \sup_{0 \leq x \leq 1} \left| \frac{\# X \cap [0,x]}{\# X} - x \right| \lesssim \frac{\sqrt{\log{n}}}{…
Learning discrete distributions from i.i.d. samples is a well-understood problem. However, advances in generative machine learning prompt an interesting new, non-i.i.d. setting: after receiving a certain number of samples, an estimated…
Geometric medians on product manifolds are sensitive to the relative scaling of factor metrics because the median objective couples the factors rather than separating them. We study this scale-selection problem and first prove that naive…
We establish a lower bound on the entropy of weighted sums of (possibly dependent) random variables $(X_1, X_2, \dots, X_n)$ possessing a symmetric joint distribution. Our lower bound is in terms of the joint entropy of $(X_1, X_2, \dots,…
We study the problem of modeling univariate distributions via their quantile functions. We introduce a flexible family of distributions whose quantile function is a linear combination of basis quantiles. Because the model is linear in its…
Determining the strength of non-linear statistical dependencies between two variables is a crucial matter in many research fields. The established measure for quantifying such relations is the mutual information. However, estimating mutual…
Quantiles, such as the median or percentiles, provide concise and useful information about the distribution of a collection of items, drawn from a totally ordered universe. We study data structures, called quantile summaries, which keep…
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…
Uniform deviation bounds limit the difference between a model's expected loss and its loss on an empirical sample uniformly for all models in a learning problem. As such, they are a critical component to empirical risk minimization. In this…
Consider the problem of estimating a random variable $X$ from noisy observations $Y = X+ Z$, where $Z$ is standard normal, under the $L^1$ fidelity criterion. It is well known that the optimal Bayesian estimator in this setting is the…
Suppose $\widehat\theta_n$ is a strongly consistent estimator for $\theta_0$ in some i.i.d. situation. Let $N_\varepsilon$ and $Q_\varepsilon$ be respectively the last $n$ and the total number of $n$ for which $\widehat\theta_n$ is at least…
The average properties of the well-known Subset Sum Problem can be studied by the means of its randomised version, where we are given a target value $z$, random variables $X_1, \ldots, X_n$, and an error parameter $\varepsilon > 0$, and we…