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Related papers: Optimality of Maximum Likelihood for Log-Concave D…

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We study nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation for two classes of multivariate distributions that imply strong forms of positive dependence; namely log-supermodular (MTP$_2$) distributions and log-$L^\#$-concave (LLC) distributions.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-07-10 Elina Robeva , Bernd Sturmfels , Ngoc Tran , Caroline Uhler

We study the problem of maximum likelihood estimation of densities that are log-concave and lie in the graphical model corresponding to a given undirected graph $G$. We show that the maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) is the product of the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-12-02 Kaie Kubjas , Olga Kuznetsova , Elina Robeva , Pardis Semnani , Luca Sodomaco

We estimate convex polytopes and general convex sets in $\mathbb R^d,d\geq 2$ in the regression framework. We measure the risk of our estimators using a $L^1$-type loss function and prove upper bounds on these risks. We show that, in the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2012-11-16 Victor-Emmanuel Brunel

This work studies the computational aspects of multivariate convex regression in dimensions $d \ge 5$. Our results include the \emph{first} estimators that are minimax optimal (up to logarithmic factors) with polynomial runtime in the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-12-30 Gil Kur , Eli Putterman

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-11-23 Yuki Takazawa , Tomonari Sei

In this paper, we extend the scope of Caffarelli's contraction theorem, which provides a measure of the Lipschitz constant for optimal transport maps between log-concave probability densities in $\R^d$. Our focus is on a broader category of…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2024-04-09 Guillaume Carlier , Alessio Figalli , Filippo Santambrogio

The estimation of a log-concave density on $\mathbb{R}$ is a canonical problem in the area of shape-constrained nonparametric inference. We present a Bayesian nonparametric approach to this problem based on an exponentiated Dirichlet…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-07-14 Ester Mariucci , Kolyan Ray , Botond Szabo

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-07-25 Elina Robeva , Bernd Sturmfels , Caroline Uhler

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2014-04-11 Yining Chen , Richard J. Samworth

Score estimation has recently emerged as a key modern statistical challenge, due to its pivotal role in generative modelling via diffusion models. Moreover, it is an essential ingredient in a new approach to linear regression via convex…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-12-17 Rebecca M. Lewis , Oliver Y. Feng , Henry W. J. Reeve , Min Xu , Richard J. Samworth

Let $X_1,\dots,X_n$ be i.i.d. log-concave random vectors in $\mathbb R^d$ with mean 0 and covariance matrix $\Sigma$. We study the problem of quantifying the normal approximation error for $W=n^{-1/2}\sum_{i=1}^nX_i$ with explicit…

Probability · Mathematics 2023-05-30 Xiao Fang , Yuta Koike

We solve the problem of estimating the distribution of presumed i.i.d. observations for the total variation loss. Our approach is based on density models and is versatile enough to cope with many different ones, including some density…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-01-05 Y. Baraud , H. Halconruy , G. Maillard

We propose a unified framework for likelihood-based regression modeling when the response variable has finite support. Our work is motivated by the fact that, in practice, observed data are discrete and bounded. The proposed methods assume…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-09-13 Karl Oskar Ekvall , Matteo Bottai

The problem of minimizing convex functionals of probability distributions is solved under the assumption that the density of every distribution is bounded from above and below. A system of sufficient and necessary first-order optimality…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2018-12-05 Michael Fauss , Abdelhak M. Zoubir

In recent years, log-concave density estimation via maximum likelihood estimation has emerged as a fascinating alternative to traditional nonparametric smoothing techniques, such as kernel density estimation, which require the choice of one…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-09-12 Richard J. Samworth

We study nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation of a log-concave density function $f_0$ which is known to satisfy further constraints, where either (a) the mode $m$ of $f_0$ is known, or (b) $f_0$ is known to be symmetric about a fixed…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-05-15 Charles R. Doss , Jon A. Wellner

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-04-16 Robin Dunn , Aditya Gangrade , Larry Wasserman , Aaditya Ramdas

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-05-10 Guenther Walther , Alnur Ali , Xinyue Shen , Stephen Boyd

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…

Computation · Statistics 2025-07-30 David Clancy , Hanbaek Lyu , Sebastien Roch

In this paper, we study the problem of sampling from a given probability density function that is known to be smooth and strongly log-concave. We analyze several methods of approximate sampling based on discretizations of the (highly…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-02-26 Arnak S. Dalalyan , Avetik G. Karagulyan