Related papers: Universal Inference Meets Random Projections: A Sc…
On observing a sequence of i.i.d.\ data with distribution $P$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$, we ask the question of how one can test the null hypothesis that $P$ has a log-concave density. This paper proves one interesting negative and positive result:…
Shape-constrained density estimation is an important topic in mathematical statistics. We focus on densities on $\mathbb{R}^d$ that are log-concave, and we study geometric properties of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) for weighted…
We study nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation of a log-concave density function $f_0$ which is known to satisfy further constraints, where either (a) the mode $m$ of $f_0$ is known, or (b) $f_0$ is known to be symmetric about a fixed…
Log-concave distributions are an attractive choice for modeling and inference, for several reasons: The class of log-concave distributions contains most of the commonly used parametric distributions and thus is a rich and flexible…
We solve the problem of estimating the distribution of presumed i.i.d. observations for the total variation loss. Our approach is based on density models and is versatile enough to cope with many different ones, including some density…
We study the problem of maximum likelihood estimation of densities that are log-concave and lie in the graphical model corresponding to a given undirected graph $G$. We show that the maximum likelihood estimate (MLE) is the product of the…
We study the problem of computing the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of multivariate log-concave densities. Our main result is the first computationally efficient algorithm for this problem. In more detail, we give an algorithm that, on…
The assumption of log-concavity is a flexible and appealing nonparametric shape constraint in distribution modelling. In this work, we study the log-concave maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of a probability mass function (pmf). We show…
In Statistics, log-concave density estimation is a central problem within the field of nonparametric inference under shape constraints. Despite great progress in recent years on the statistical theory of the canonical estimator, namely the…
We study a likelihood ratio test for the location of the mode of a log-concave density. Our test is based on comparison of the log-likelihoods corresponding to the unconstrained maximum likelihood estimator of a log-concave density and the…
We present a new approach for inference about a log-concave distribution: Instead of using the method of maximum likelihood, we propose to incorporate the log-concavity constraint in an appropriate nonparametric confidence set for the cdf…
Let X_1, ..., X_n be independent and identically distributed random vectors with a log-concave (Lebesgue) density f. We first prove that, with probability one, there exists a unique maximum likelihood estimator of f. The use of this…
Phylogenetic trees are key data objects in biology, and the method of phylogenetic reconstruction has been highly developed. The space of phylogenetic trees is a nonpositively curved metric space. Recently, statistical methods to analyze…
We study the problem of learning multivariate log-concave densities with respect to a global loss function. We obtain the first upper bound on the sample complexity of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) for a log-concave density on…
We propose a unified framework for likelihood-based regression modeling when the response variable has finite support. Our work is motivated by the fact that, in practice, observed data are discrete and bounded. The proposed methods assume…
We consider a generic class of log-concave, possibly random, (Gibbs) measures. We prove the concentration of an infinite family of order parameters called multioverlaps. Because they completely parametrise the quenched Gibbs measure of the…
A novel computational approach to log-concave density estimation is proposed. Previous approaches utilize the piecewise-affine parametrization of the density induced by the given sample set. The number of parameters as well as non-smooth…
The log-concave maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) problem answers: for a set of points $X_1,...X_n \in \mathbb R^d$, which log-concave density maximizes their likelihood? We present a characterization of the log-concave MLE that leads to…
We study probability density functions that are log-concave. Despite the space of all such densities being infinite-dimensional, the maximum likelihood estimate is the exponential of a piecewise linear function determined by finitely many…
The log-concave projection is an operator that maps a d-dimensional distribution P to an approximating log-concave density. Prior work by D{\"u}mbgen et al. (2011) establishes that, with suitable metrics on the underlying spaces, this…