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Related papers: Maximum Likelihood Estimation of Log-Concave Densi…

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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…

Methodology · Statistics 2008-04-25 Madeleine Cule , Richard Samworth , Michael Stewart

We consider nonparametric maximum-likelihood estimation of a log-concave density in case of interval-censored, right-censored and binned data. We allow for the possibility of a subprobability density with an additional mass at $+\infty$,…

Methodology · Statistics 2014-08-15 Lutz Duembgen , Kaspar Rufibach , Dominic Schuhmacher

We study the smoothed log-concave maximum likelihood estimator of a probability distribution on $\mathbb{R}^d$. This is a fully automatic nonparametric density estimator, obtained as a canonical smoothing of the log-concave maximum…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2014-04-11 Yining Chen , Richard J. Samworth

In recent years, log-concave density estimation via maximum likelihood estimation has emerged as a fascinating alternative to traditional nonparametric smoothing techniques, such as kernel density estimation, which require the choice of one…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-09-12 Richard J. Samworth

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…

Computation · Statistics 2023-03-01 Wenyu Chen , Rahul Mazumder , Richard J. Samworth

We investigate the optimization landscape of maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) for the Cavender-Farris-Neyman (CFN) model, a two-state latent tree model fundamental to statistical phylogenetics and the ferromagnetic Ising model. Although…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-05-22 David Clancy , Hanbaek Lyu , Sebastien Roch

The estimation of a log-concave density on $\mathbb{R}$ is a canonical problem in the area of shape-constrained nonparametric inference. We present a Bayesian nonparametric approach to this problem based on an exponentiated Dirichlet…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-07-14 Ester Mariucci , Kolyan Ray , Botond Szabo

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-12-02 Kaie Kubjas , Olga Kuznetsova , Elina Robeva , Pardis Semnani , Luca Sodomaco

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-05-15 Charles R. Doss , Jon A. Wellner

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…

We consider the branch-length estimation problem on a bifurcating tree: a character evolves along the edges of a binary tree according to a two-state symmetric Markov process, and we seek to recover the edge transition probabilities from…

Computation · Statistics 2025-07-30 David Clancy , Hanbaek Lyu , Sebastien Roch

We consider the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation for the underlying event time based on mixed-case interval-censored data, under a log-concavity assumption on its distribution function. This generalized framework relaxes the…

Computation · Statistics 2024-12-02 Chi Wing Chu , Hok Kan Ling , Chaoyu Yuan

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…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-05-10 Guenther Walther , Alnur Ali , Xinyue Shen , Stephen Boyd

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…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-12-14 Ilias Diakonikolas , Anastasios Sidiropoulos , Alistair Stewart

We study the optimization landscape of the log-likelihood function and the convergence of the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm in latent Gaussian tree models, i.e. tree-structured Gaussian graphical models whose leaf nodes are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-28 Yuval Dagan , Constantinos Daskalakis , Anthimos Vardis Kandiros

We present theoretical properties of the log-concave maximum likelihood estimator of a density based on an independent and identically distributed sample in $\mathbb{R}^d$. Our study covers both the case where the true underlying density is…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2009-09-01 Madeleine Cule , Richard Samworth

We study nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation for two classes of multivariate distributions that imply strong forms of positive dependence; namely log-supermodular (MTP$_2$) distributions and log-$L^\#$-concave (LLC) distributions.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-07-10 Elina Robeva , Bernd Sturmfels , Ngoc Tran , Caroline Uhler

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…

Computation · Statistics 2019-02-21 Fabian Rathke , Christoph Schnörr

Motivated by studies in biological sciences to detect differentially expressed genes, a semiparametric two-component mixture model with one known component is being studied in this paper. Assuming the density of the unknown component to be…

Methodology · Statistics 2019-03-28 Yangmei Zhou , Weixin Yao

Phylogenetic inference, the task of reconstructing how related sequences evolved from common ancestors, is a central objective in evolutionary genomics. The current state-of-the-art methods exploit probabilistic models of sequence evolution…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2026-02-19 Luc Blassel , Noémie Sauvage , Pierre Barrat-Charlaix , Bastien Boussau , Nicolas Lartillot , Laurent Jacob
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