Related papers: Estimating means of bounded random variables by be…
Constructing nonasymptotic confidence intervals (CIs) for the mean of a univariate distribution from independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) observations is a fundamental task in statistics. For bounded observations, a classical…
We congratulate Waudby-Smith and Ramdas for their interesting paper \cite{waudbysmith2022estimating} in generating confidence intervals and time-uniform confidence sequences for mean estimation with bounded observations. Their methodology…
We derive a new closed-form variance-adaptive confidence sequence (CS) for estimating the average conditional mean of a sequence of bounded random variables. Empirically, it yields the tightest closed-form CS we have found for tracking…
A confidence sequence (CS) is an anytime-valid sequential inference primitive which produces an adapted sequence of sets for a predictable parameter sequence with a time-uniform coverage guarantee. This work constructs a non-parametric…
Many inference problems, such as sequential decision problems like A/B testing, adaptive sampling schemes like bandit selection, are often online in nature. The fundamental problem for online inference is to provide a sequence of confidence…
A confidence sequence (CS) is a sequence of confidence sets that contains a target parameter of an underlying stochastic process at any time step with high probability. This paper proposes a new approach to constructing CSs for means of…
We develop a class of exponential bounds for the probability that a martingale sequence crosses a time-dependent linear threshold. Our key insight is that it is both natural and fruitful to formulate exponential concentration inequalities…
In this paper, we develop a general approach for probabilistic estimation and optimization. An explicit formula and a computational approach are established for controlling the reliability of probabilistic estimation based on a mixed…
We present a new method for constructing a confidence interval for the mean of a bounded random variable from samples of the random variable. We conjecture that the confidence interval has guaranteed coverage, i.e., that it contains the…
In this paper, we consider the nonasymptotic sequential estimation of means of random variables bounded in between zero and one. We have rigorously demonstrated that, in order to guarantee prescribed relative precision and confidence level,…
We develop novel empirical Bernstein inequalities for the variance of bounded random variables. Our inequalities hold under constant conditional variance and mean, without further assumptions like independence or identical distribution of…
We consider estimating the shared mean of a sequence of heavy-tailed random variables taking values in a Banach space. In particular, we revisit and extend a simple truncation-based mean estimator first proposed by Catoni and Giulini. While…
The martingale method is used to establish concentration inequalities for a class of dependent random sequences on a countable state space, with the constants in the inequalities expressed in terms of certain mixing coefficients. Along the…
We consider the problem of estimating the mean of a sequence of random elements $f(X_1, \theta)$ $, \ldots, $ $f(X_n, \theta)$ where $f$ is a fixed scalar function, $S=(X_1, \ldots, X_n)$ are independent random variables, and $\theta$ is a…
We consider a discrete time stochastic model with infinite variance and study the mean estimation problem as in Wang and Ramdas (2023). We refine the Catoni-type confidence sequence (abbr. CS) and use an idea of Bhatt et al. (2022) to…
The Chernoff bound is a well-known tool for obtaining a high probability bound on the expectation of a Bernoulli random variable in terms of its sample average. This bound is commonly used in statistical learning theory to upper bound the…
The construction of confidence intervals for the mean of a bounded random variable is a classical problem in statistics with numerous applications in machine learning and virtually all scientific fields. In particular, obtaining the…
We consider the problem of deriving uniform confidence bands for the mean of a monotonic stochastic process, such as the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of a random variable, based on a sequence of i.i.d.~observations. Our approach…
Concentration inequalities for the sample mean, like those due to Bernstein, Hoeffding, and Bentkus, are valid for any sample size but overly conservative, yielding confidence intervals that are unnecessarily wide. The central limit theorem…
This paper is devoted to the estimators of the mean that provide strong non-asymptotic guarantees under minimal assumptions on the underlying distribution. The main ideas behind proposed techniques are based on bridging the notions of…