Related papers: How good is Good-Turing for Markov samples?
Given $n$ samples from a population of individuals belonging to different types with unknown proportions, how do we estimate the probability of discovering a new type at the $(n+1)$-th draw? This is a classical problem in statistics,…
The brilliant method due to Good and Turing allows for estimating objects not occurring in a sample. The problem, known under names "sample coverage" or "missing mass" goes back to their cryptographic work during WWII, but over years has…
We study the problem of estimating the stationary mass -- also called the unigram mass -- that is missing from a single trajectory of a discrete-time, ergodic Markov chain. This problem has several applications -- for example, estimating…
We observe a length-$n$ sample generated by an unknown,stationary ergodic Markov process (\emph{model}) over a finite alphabet $\mathcal{A}$. Given any string $\bf{w}$ of symbols from $\mathcal{A}$ we want estimates of the conditional…
Estimating the underlying distribution from \textit{iid} samples is a classical and important problem in statistics. When the alphabet size is large compared to number of samples, a portion of the distribution is highly likely to be…
The problem of estimating the missing mass or total probability of unseen elements in a sequence of $n$ random samples is considered under the squared error loss function. The worst-case risk of the popular Good-Turing estimator is shown to…
Feature allocation models generalize species sampling models by allowing every observation to belong to more than one species, now called features. Under the popular Bernoulli product model for feature allocation, given $n$ samples, we…
We consider the problem of estimating the total probability of all symbols that appear with a given frequency in a string of i.i.d. random variables with unknown distribution. We focus on the regime in which the block length is large yet no…
Estimating a large alphabet probability distribution from a limited number of samples is a fundamental problem in machine learning and statistics. A variety of estimation schemes have been proposed over the years, mostly inspired by the…
Distribution estimation under error-prone or non-ideal sampling modelled as "sticky" channels have been studied recently motivated by applications such as DNA computing. Missing mass, the sum of probabilities of missing letters, is an…
The spectral gap $\gamma$ of a finite, ergodic, and reversible Markov chain is an important parameter measuring the asymptotic rate of convergence. In applications, the transition matrix $P$ may be unknown, yet one sample of the chain up to…
We consider a high-dimensional mean estimation problem over a binary hidden Markov model, which illuminates the interplay between memory in data, sample size, dimension, and signal strength in statistical inference. In this model, an…
We consider the problem of estimating the probability of an observed string drawn i.i.d. from an unknown distribution. The key feature of our study is that the length of the observed string is assumed to be of the same order as the size of…
Consider a random sample $(X_{1},\ldots,X_{n})$ from an unknown discrete distribution $P=\sum_{j\geq1}p_{j}\delta_{s_{j}}$ on a countable alphabet $\mathbb{S}$, and let $(Y_{n,j})_{j\geq1}$ be the empirical frequencies of distinct symbols…
The problem of missing mass in statistical inference (posed by McAllester and Ortiz, NIPS'02; most recently revisited by Changa and Thangaraj, ISIT'2019) seeks to estimate the weight of symbols that have not been sampled yet from a source.…
The missing mass refers to the probability of elements not observed in a sample, and since the work of Good and Turing during WWII, has been studied extensively in many areas including ecology, linguistic, networks and information theory.…
We consider the problem of estimating the missing mass, partition function or evidence and its probability distribution in the case that for each sample point in the discrete sample space its (unnormalized) probability mass is revealed.…
The missing data issue often complicates the task of estimating generalized linear models (GLMs). We describe why the pseudo-marginal Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, used in this setting, is an effective strategy for parameter estimation.…
This paper provides a precise error analysis for the maximum likelihood estimate $\hat{a}_{\text{ML}}(u_1^n)$ of the parameter $a$ given samples $u_1^n = (u_1, \ldots, u_n)'$ drawn from a nonstationary Gauss-Markov process $U_i = a U_{i-1}…
Feature models are popular in machine learning and they have been recently used to solve many unsupervised learning problems. In these models every observation is endowed with a finite set of features, usually selected from an infinite…