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Related papers: Optimal Mean Estimation without a Variance

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We derive new and improved non-asymptotic deviation inequalities for the sample average approximation (SAA) of an optimization problem. Our results give strong error probability bounds that are "sub-Gaussian"~even when the randomness of the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-28 Roberto I. Oliveira , Philip Thompson

We consider the problem of constructing a least conservative estimator of the expected value $\mu$ of a non-negative heavy-tailed random variable. We require that the probability of overestimating the expected value $\mu$ is kept…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-21 Bart P. G. van Parys , Bert Zwart

We consider the problem of finding an approximate solution to $\ell_1$ regression while only observing a small number of labels. Given an $n \times d$ unlabeled data matrix $X$, we must choose a small set of $m \ll n$ rows to observe the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-21 Aditya Parulekar , Advait Parulekar , Eric Price

Estimating the maximum mean finds a variety of applications in practice. In this paper, we study estimation of the maximum mean using an upper confidence bound (UCB) approach where the sampling budget is adaptively allocated to one of the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-08-09 Zhang Kun , Liu Guangwu , Shi Wen

An important part of the legacy of Evarist Gin\'e is his fundamental contributions to our understanding of $U$-statistics and $U$-processes. In this paper we discuss the estimation of the mean of multivariate functions in case of possibly…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-04-20 Emilien Joly , Gábor Lugosi

Let $X$ be a random variable with unknown mean and finite variance. We present a new estimator of the mean of $X$ that is robust with respect to the possible presence of outliers in the sample, provides tight sub-Gaussian deviation…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-01-03 Stanislav Minsker , Mohamed Ndaoud

Given $n$ samples from a population of individuals belonging to different species, what is the number $U$ of hitherto unseen species that would be observed if $\lambda n$ new samples were collected? This is an important problem in many…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-03-17 Stefano Favaro , Zacharie Naulet

Randomized approximation algorithms for many #P-complete problems (such as the partition function of a Gibbs distribution, the volume of a convex body, the permanent of a $\{0,1\}$-matrix, and many others) reduce to creating random…

Computation · Statistics 2017-06-30 Mark Huber

The central limit theorem introduced by Stute [The central limit theorem under random censorship. Ann. Statist. 1995; 23: 422-439] does not hold for some class of heavy-tailed distributions. In this paper, we make use of the extreme value…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-07-19 Louiza Soltane , Djamel Meraghni , Abdelhakim Necir

This article is devoted to the study of tail index estimation based on i.i.d. multivariate observations, drawn from a standard heavy-tailed distribution, i.e. of which 1-d Pareto-like marginals share the same tail index. A multivariate…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2014-04-10 Stéphan Clémençon , Antoine Dematteo

Bootstrap smoothed (bagged) parameter estimators have been proposed as an improvement on estimators found after preliminary data-based model selection. The key result of Efron (2014) is a very convenient and widely applicable formula for a…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-04-29 Paul Kabaila , Christeen Wijethunga

We study the problem of {\em list-decodable mean estimation} for bounded covariance distributions. Specifically, we are given a set $T$ of points in $\mathbb{R}^d$ with the promise that an unknown $\alpha$-fraction of points in $T$, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Ilias Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Daniel Kongsgaard

Big data can easily be contaminated by outliers or contain variables with heavy-tailed distributions, which makes many conventional methods inadequate. To address this challenge, we propose the adaptive Huber regression for robust…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-10-11 Qiang Sun , Wenxin Zhou , Jianqing Fan

We study a class of robust mean estimators $\widehat{\mu}$ obtained by adaptively shrinking the weights of sample points far from a base estimator $\widehat{\kappa}$. Given a data-dependent scaling factor $\widehat{\alpha}$ and a weighting…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-12-17 Antônio Catão , Lucas Resende , Paulo Orenstein

We design an $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-differentially private algorithm to estimate the mean of a $d$-variate distribution, with unknown covariance $\Sigma$, that is adaptive to $\Sigma$. To within polylogarithmic factors, the estimator…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-18 John Duchi , Saminul Haque , Rohith Kuditipudi

In this paper, we develop connections between two seemingly disparate, but central, models in robust statistics: Huber's epsilon-contamination model and the heavy-tailed noise model. We provide conditions under which this connection…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-07-03 Adarsh Prasad , Sivaraman Balakrishnan , Pradeep Ravikumar

We present a fast, differentially private algorithm for high-dimensional covariance-aware mean estimation with nearly optimal sample complexity. Only exponential-time estimators were previously known to achieve this guarantee. Given $n$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Gavin Brown , Samuel B. Hopkins , Adam Smith

This article deals with the hypothesis test for the extremely heavy-tailed distributions with infinite mean or variance by using a truncated sample mean. We obtain three necessary and sufficient conditions under which the asymptotic…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-12-07 Tang Fuquan , Han Dong

Estimating the mean of a random vector from i.i.d. data has received considerable attention, and the optimal accuracy one may achieve with a given confidence is fairly well understood by now. When the data take values in more general metric…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-09-18 Daniel Bartl , Gabor Lugosi , Roberto Imbuzeiro Oliveira , Zoraida F. Rico

This article proposes a new method of truncated estimation to estimate the tail index $\alpha$ of the extremely heavy-tailed distribution with infinite mean or variance. We not only present two truncated estimators $\hat{\alpha}$ and…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-09-13 F. Q. Tang , D. Han