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

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We study regression of $1$-Lipschitz functions under a log-concave measure $\mu$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$. We focus on the high-dimensional regime where the sample size $n$ is subexponential in $d$, in which distribution-free estimators are…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-09-15 Pierre Bizeul , Boaz Klartag

We study minimax estimation of two-dimensional totally positive distributions. Such distributions pertain to pairs of strongly positively dependent random variables and appear frequently in statistics and probability. In particular, for…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-06-16 Jan-Christian Hütter , Cheng Mao , Philippe Rigollet , Elina Robeva

We prove log-concavity of the lengths of the top rows of Young diagrams under Poissonized Plancherel measure. This is the first known positive result towards a 2008 conjecture of Chen that the length of the top row of a Young diagram under…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-01-29 Jnaneshwar Baslingker , Manjunath Krishnapur , Mokshay Madiman

Under the usual nonparametric regression model with Gaussian errors, Least Squares Estimators (LSEs) over natural subclasses of convex functions are shown to be suboptimal for estimating a $d$-dimensional convex function in squared error…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-09-05 Gil Kur , Fuchang Gao , Adityanand Guntuboyina , Bodhisattva Sen

This thesis studies high-dimensional, continuous-valued pairwise Markov Random Fields. We are particularly interested in approximating pairwise densities whose logarithm belongs to a Sobolev space. For this problem we propose the method of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-06-12 Eric Janofsky

This paper presents a new Metropolis-adjusted Langevin algorithm (MALA) that uses convex analysis to simulate efficiently from high-dimensional densities that are log-concave, a class of probability distributions that is widely used in…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-04-06 Marcelo Pereyra

The assumption of log-concavity is a flexible and appealing nonparametric shape constraint in distribution modelling. In this work, we study the log-concave maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of a probability mass function (pmf). We show…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-04-17 Fadoua Balabdaoui , Hanna Jankowski , Kaspar Rufibach , Marios Pavlides

In this paper, we establish explicit convergence rates for the stochastic smooth approximations of infimal convolutions introduced and developed in \cite{MR4581306,MR4923371}. In particular, we quantify the convergence of the associated…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-23 Diego Morales , Pedro Pérez-Aros , Emilio Vilches

Kiefer and Wolfowitz [Z. Wahrsch. Verw. Gebiete 34 (1976) 73--85] showed that if $F$ is a strictly curved concave distribution function (corresponding to a strictly monotone density $f$), then the Maximum Likelihood Estimator $\hat{F}_n$,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2007-10-10 Fadoua Balabdaoui , Jon A. Wellner

Convex risk measures play a foundational role in the area of stochastic optimization. However, in contrast to risk neutral models, their applications are still limited due to the lack of efficient solution methods. In particular, the mean…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-30 Zhichao Jia , Guanghui Lan , Zhe Zhang

The paper provides global optimization algorithms for two particularly difficult nonconvex problems raised by hybrid system identification: switching linear regression and bounded-error estimation. While most works focus on local…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-27 Fabien Lauer

We consider two nonparametric procedures for estimating a concave distribution function based on data corrupted with additive noise generated by a bounded decreasing density on $(0,\infty)$. For the maximum likelihood (ML) estimator and…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2009-04-02 Geurt Jongbloed , Frank H. van der Meulen

Let $X$ be a centered random vector taking values in $\mathbb{R}^d$ and let $\Sigma= \mathbb{E}(X\otimes X)$ be its covariance matrix. We show that if $X$ satisfies an $L_4-L_2$ norm equivalence, there is a covariance estimator…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-03-28 Shahar Mendelson , Nikita Zhivotovskiy

There has been a surge of interest in developing robust estimators for models with heavy-tailed and bounded variance data in statistics and machine learning, while few works impose unbounded variance. This paper proposes two type of robust…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-12 Lihu Xu , Fang Yao , Qiuran Yao , Huiming Zhang

We investigate the optimization landscape of maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) for the Cavender-Farris-Neyman (CFN) model, a two-state latent tree model fundamental to statistical phylogenetics and the ferromagnetic Ising model. Although…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-05-22 David Clancy , Hanbaek Lyu , Sebastien Roch

Random projection techniques based on Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma are used for randomly aggregating the constraints or variables of optimization problems while approximately preserving their optimal values, that leads to smaller-scale…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-07-13 Terunari Fuji , Pierre-Louis Poirion , Akiko Takeda

Many algorithms in machine learning and computational geometry require, as input, the intrinsic dimension of the manifold that supports the probability distribution of the data. This parameter is rarely known and therefore has to be…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-01-01 Jisu Kim , Alessandro Rinaldo , Larry Wasserman

This paper proves, in very general settings, that convex risk minimization is a procedure to select a unique conditional probability model determined by the classification problem. Unlike most previous work, we give results that are general…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-06-16 Matus Telgarsky , Miroslav Dudík , Robert Schapire

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-09-16 Charles R. Doss , Jon A. Wellner

We consider regression problems with binary weights. Such optimization problems are ubiquitous in quantized learning models and digital communication systems. A natural approach is to optimize the corresponding Lagrangian using variants of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-01 Nisan Chiprut , Amir Globerson , Ami Wiesel