Related papers: A Polynomial Time Algorithm for Maximum Likelihood…
We advocate for a practical Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) approach towards designing loss functions for regression and forecasting, as an alternative to the typical approach of direct empirical risk minimization on a specific target…
We establish global rates of convergence for the Maximum Likelihood Estimators (MLEs) of log-concave and $s$-concave densities on $\mathbb{R}$. The main finding is that the rate of convergence of the MLE in the Hellinger metric is no worse…
We consider the problem of computing a positive definite $p \times p$ inverse covariance matrix aka precision matrix $\theta=(\theta_{ij})$ which optimizes a regularized Gaussian maximum likelihood problem, with the elastic-net regularizer…
We consider the problem of estimating the parameters of a Gaussian or binary distribution in such a way that the resulting undirected graphical model is sparse. Our approach is to solve a maximum likelihood problem with an added l_1-norm…
Maximum likelihood estimators (MLE) and control variate estimators (CVE) have been used in conjunction with known information across sketching algorithms and applications in machine learning. We prove that under certain conditions in an…
In maximum-likelihood quantum state tomography, both the sample size and dimension grow exponentially with the number of qubits. It is therefore desirable to develop a stochastic first-order method, just like stochastic gradient descent for…
Sparse polynomial approximation has become indispensable for approximating smooth, high- or infinite-dimensional functions from limited samples. This is a key task in computational science and engineering, e.g., surrogate modelling in…
This paper addresses the problem of mixed-membership estimation in networks, where the goal is to efficiently estimate the latent mixed-membership structure from the observed network. Recognizing the widespread availability and valuable…
We suggest an iterative approach to computing K-step maximum likelihood estimates (MLE) of the parametric components in semiparametric models based on their profile likelihoods. The higher order convergence rate of K-step MLE mainly depends…
We propose an exact polynomial algorithm for a resource allocation problem with convex costs and constraints on partial sums of resource consumptions, in the presence of either continuous or integer variables. No assumption of strict…
Our investigation concerns the estimation of predictive densities and a study of efficiency as measured by the frequentist risk of such predictive densities with integrated $L_2$ and $L_1$ losses. Our findings relate to a $p-$variate…
Maximum-likelihood estimation (MLE) is arguably the most important tool for statisticians, and many methods have been developed to find the MLE. We present a new inequality involving posterior distributions of a latent variable that holds…
Recently, several works have shown that natural modifications of the classical conditional gradient method (aka Frank-Wolfe algorithm) for constrained convex optimization, provably converge with a linear rate when: i) the feasible set is a…
We consider the problem of sampling from the posterior distribution of a $d$-dimensional coefficient vector $\boldsymbol{\theta}$, given linear observations $\boldsymbol{y} = \boldsymbol{X}\boldsymbol{\theta}+\boldsymbol{\varepsilon}$. In…
Determinantal point processes (DPPs) have wide-ranging applications in machine learning, where they are used to enforce the notion of diversity in subset selection problems. Many estimators have been proposed, but surprisingly the basic…
Training an energy-based model (EBM) with maximum likelihood is challenging due to the intractable normalisation constant. Traditional methods rely on expensive Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling to estimate the gradient of logartihm…
This paper considers the average complexity of maximum likelihood (ML) decoding of convolutional codes. ML decoding can be modeled as finding the most probable path taken through a Markov graph. Integrated with the Viterbi algorithm (VA),…
We study nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation of probability densities under a total variation (TV) type penalty, sectional variation norm (also named as Hardy-Krause variation). TV regularization has a long history in regression and…
This paper presents a detailed theoretical analysis of the three stochastic approximation proximal gradient algorithms proposed in our companion paper [49] to set regularization parameters by marginal maximum likelihood estimation. We prove…
We present a new approach for inference about a log-concave distribution: Instead of using the method of maximum likelihood, we propose to incorporate the log-concavity constraint in an appropriate nonparametric confidence set for the cdf…