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Related papers: Optimal Mean Estimation without a Variance

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The purpose of the present paper is to assess the efficacy of confidence intervals for Rosenthal's fail-safe number. Although Rosenthal's estimator is highly used by researchers, its statistical properties are largely unexplored. First of…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-09-07 Konstantinos C. Fragkos , Michail Tsagris , Christos C. Frangos

We study confidence intervals based on hard-thresholding, soft-thresholding, and adaptive soft-thresholding in a linear regression model where the number of regressors $k$ may depend on and diverge with sample size $n$. In addition to the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-10-08 Ulrike Schneider

Say $X_1,X_2,\ldots$ are independent identically distributed Bernoulli random variables with mean $p$. This paper builds a new estimate $\hat p$ of $p$ that has the property that the relative error, $\hat p /p - 1$, of the estimate does not…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-11-18 Mark Huber

We study the problem of estimating the mean of a multivariatedistribution based on independent samples. The main result is the proof of existence of an estimator with a non-asymptotic sub-Gaussian performance for all distributions…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-07-20 Emilien Joly , Gábor Lugosi , Roberto I. Oliveira

The maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) is a kernel-based distance between probability distributions useful in many applications (Gretton et al. 2012), bearing a simple estimator with pleasing computational and statistical properties. Being able…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-11-16 Danica J. Sutherland , Namrata Deka

We obtain the minimax rate for a mean location model with a bounded star-shaped set $K \subseteq \mathbb{R}^n$ constraint on the mean, in an adversarially corrupted data setting with Gaussian noise. We assume an unknown fraction $\epsilon…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-03-06 Akshay Prasadan , Matey Neykov

It is the purpose of this paper to investigate the issue of estimating the regularity index $\beta>0$ of a discrete heavy-tailed r.v. $S$, \textit{i.e.} a r.v. $S$ valued in $\mathbb{N}^*$ such that $\mathbb{P}(S>n)=L(n)\cdot n^{-\beta}$…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-09-23 Patrice Bertail , Stephan Clémençon , Carlos Fernández

We develop an unsupervised mixture model for non-negative, skewed and heavy-tailed data, such as losses in actuarial and risk management applications. The mixture has a lognormal component, which is usually appropriate for the body of the…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-05-29 Marco Bee , Flavio Santi

This paper considers an empirical risk minimization problem under heavy-tailed settings, where data does not have finite variance, but only has $p$-th moment with $p \in (1,2)$. Instead of using estimation procedure based on truncated…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-09-08 Guanhua Fang , Ping Li , Gennady Samorodnitsky

This paper proposes a novel non-parametric multidimensional convex regression estimator which is designed to be robust to adversarial perturbations in the empirical measure. We minimize over convex functions the maximum (over Wasserstein…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-07-28 Jose Blanchet , Peter W. Glynn , Jun Yan , Zhengqing Zhou

We consider estimation and inference on average treatment effects under unconfoundedness conditional on the realizations of the treatment variable and covariates. Given nonparametric smoothness and/or shape restrictions on the conditional…

Applications · Statistics 2022-10-04 Timothy B. Armstrong , Michal Kolesár

We propose an estimator for the mean of random variables in separable real Banach spaces using the empirical characteristic function. Assuming that the covariance operator of the random variable is bounded in a precise sense, we show that…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-11-04 Sohail Bahmani

We consider stochastic optimization problems with heavy-tailed noise with structured density. For such problems, we show that it is possible to get faster rates of convergence than $\mathcal{O}(K^{-2(\alpha - 1)/\alpha})$, when the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-04-18 Nikita Puchkin , Eduard Gorbunov , Nikolay Kutuzov , Alexander Gasnikov

We consider the problem of estimating confidence intervals for the mean of a random variable, where the goal is to produce the smallest possible interval for a given number of samples. While minimax optimal algorithms are known for this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-19 Shengjia Zhao , Christopher Yeh , Stefano Ermon

We consider the problem of constructing confidence intervals for the median of a response $Y \in \mathbb{R}$ conditional on features $X \in \mathbb{R}^d$ in a situation where we are not willing to make any assumption whatsoever on the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-09-07 Dhruv Medarametla , Emmanuel J. Candès

In nonparametric statistics, rate-optimal estimators typically balance bias and stochastic error. The recent work on overparametrization raises the question whether rate-optimal estimators exist that do not obey this trade-off. In this work…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-06-21 Alexis Derumigny , Johannes Schmidt-Hieber

This paper addresses the issue of estimating the expectation of a real-valued random variable of the form $X = g(\mathbf{U})$ where $g$ is a deterministic function and $\mathbf{U}$ can be a random finite- or infinite-dimensional vector.…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2015-09-10 Clément Walter

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

We study the distribution and uncertainty of nonconvex optimization for noisy tensor completion -- the problem of estimating a low-rank tensor given incomplete and corrupted observations of its entries. Focusing on a two-stage estimation…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-18 Changxiao Cai , H. Vincent Poor , Yuxin Chen

Bias reduction in tail estimation has received considerable interest in extreme value analysis. Estimation methods that minimize the bias while keeping the mean squared error (MSE) under control, are especially useful when applying…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-06-21 Gaonyalelwe Maribe , Andréhette Verster , Jan Beirlant