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Related papers: Towards Practical Mean Bounds for Small Samples

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We provide a general result for bounding the difference between point probabilities of integer supported distributions and the translated Poisson distribution, a convenient alternative to the discretized normal. We illustrate our theorem in…

Probability · Mathematics 2017-12-05 A. D. Barbour , Adrian Röllin , Nathan Ross

Especially when facing reliability data with limited information (e.g., a small number of failures), there are strong motivations for using Bayesian inference methods. These include the option to use information from physics-of-failure or…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-10-27 Qinglong Tian , Colin Lewis-Beck , Jarad Niemi , William Meeker

We present a method of constructing statistical intervals that obtain a natural middle ground between Bayesian and frequentist statistical intervals, previously unexplored in literature: To a p% Bayesian credible interval we should assign a…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-11 Tim Ritmeester

In this paper, we obtain quantitative, non-asymptotic, and data-dependent \textit{Bernstein-von Mises type} bounds on the normal approximation of the posterior distribution in exponential family models with arbitrary centring and scaling.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-01-14 Adrian Fischer , Robert E. Gaunt , Gesine Reinert , Yvik Swan

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

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

Finite sample bounds on the estimation error of the mean by the empirical mean, uniform over a class of functions, can often be conveniently obtained in terms of Rademacher or Gaussian averages of the class. If a function of n variables has…

Probability · Mathematics 2015-03-10 Andreas Maurer

The standard approach to Bayesian inference is based on the assumption that the distribution of the data belongs to the chosen model class. However, even a small violation of this assumption can have a large impact on the outcome of a…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-06-22 Jeffrey W. Miller , David B. Dunson

We develop a general framework for conducting inference on the mean of dependent random variables given constraints on their dependency graph. We establish the consistency of an oracle variance estimator of the mean when the dependency…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-02-02 Peter M. Aronow , Forrest W. Crawford , José R. Zubizarreta

We propose a general semi-supervised inference framework focused on the estimation of the population mean. As usual in semi-supervised settings, there exists an unlabeled sample of covariate vectors and a labeled sample consisting of…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-08-15 Anru Zhang , Lawrence D. Brown , T. Tony Cai

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-11-28 Shubhanshu Shekhar , Aaditya Ramdas

New lower bounds on the total variation distance between the distribution of a sum of independent Bernoulli random variables and the Poisson random variable (with the same mean) are derived via the Chen-Stein method. The new bounds rely on…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2013-07-17 Igal Sason

Under standard regularity assumptions, we provide simple approximations for specific classes of fiducial and confidence distributions and discuss their connections with objective Bayesian posteriors. For a real parameter the approximations…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-10-18 Piero Veronese , Eugenio Melilli

A pair of probability distributions over $\{0,1\}^n$ is said to be $(k,\delta)$-wise indistinguishable if all of the size $k$ marginals are within statistical distance at most $\delta$. Previous works introduced this concept and study when…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Christopher Williamson

We connect the power of Confidence Intervals in different Frequentist methods to their reliability. We show that in the case of a bounded parameter a biased method which near the boundary has large power in testing the parameter against…

High Energy Physics - Experiment · Physics 2007-05-23 C. Giunti , M. Laveder

We obtain non-asymptotic Gaussian concentration bounds for the difference between the invariant measure $\nu$ of an ergodic Brownian diffusion process and the empirical distribution of an approximating scheme with decreasing time step along…

Probability · Mathematics 2018-05-28 Igor Honoré , Stephane Menozzi , Gilles Pagès

Confidence interval of mean is often used when quoting statistics. The same rigor is often missing when quoting percentiles and tolerance or percentile intervals. This article derives the expression for confidence in percentiles of a sample…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-03-01 Sanjay M. Joshi

We revisit the problem of estimating the mean of a real-valued distribution, presenting a novel estimator with sub-Gaussian convergence: intuitively, "our estimator, on any distribution, is as accurate as the sample mean is for the Gaussian…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-11-18 Jasper C. H. Lee , Paul Valiant

We consider the problem of interval estimation of the odds ratio. An asymptotic confidence interval is widely applied in medical research. Unfortunately that confidence interval has a poor coverage probability: it is significantly smaller…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-11-19 Zofia Zielińska-Kolasińska , Wojciech Zieliński

Computing the probability of evidence even with known error bounds is NP-hard. In this paper we address this hard problem by settling on an easier problem. We propose an approximation which provides high confidence lower bounds on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-06-26 Vibhav Gogate , Bozhena Bidyuk , Rina Dechter