Related papers: Optimal estimation of high-order missing masses, a…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
We study the problem of estimating the joint probability mass function (pmf) over two random variables. In particular, the estimation is based on the observation of $m$ samples containing both variables and $n$ samples missing one fixed…
We propose a general methodology for the construction and analysis of minimax estimators for a wide class of functionals of finite dimensional parameters, and elaborate on the case of discrete distributions, where the alphabet size $S$ is…
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,…
Given $n$ samples from a population of individuals belonging to different species, what is the number $U$ of hitherto unseen species that would be observed if $\lambda n$ new samples were collected? This is an important problem in many…
We study the problem of estimating the joint probability mass function (pmf) over two random variables. In particular, the estimation is based on the observation of $m$ samples containing both variables and $n$ samples missing one fixed…
This paper addresses a problem of estimating an additive functional given $n$ i.i.d. samples drawn from a discrete distribution $P=(p_1,...,p_k)$ with alphabet size $k$. The additive functional is defined as…
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…
A random variable is sampled from a discrete distribution. The missing mass is the probability of the set of points not observed in the sample. We sharpen and simplify McAllester and Ortiz's results (JMLR, 2003) bounding the probability of…
We consider the problem of estimating the $L_1$ distance between two discrete probability measures $P$ and $Q$ from empirical data in a nonasymptotic and large alphabet setting. When $Q$ is known and one obtains $n$ samples from $P$, we…
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…
By a mixture density is meant a density of the form $\pi_{\mu}(\cdot)=\int\pi_{\theta}(\cdot)\times\mu(d\theta)$, where $(\pi_{\theta})_{\theta\in\Theta}$ is a family of probability densities and $\mu$ is a probability measure on $\Theta$.…
We address a parametric joint detection-estimation problem for discrete signals of the form $x(t) = \sum_{n=1}^{N} \alpha_n e^{-i \lambda_n t } + \epsilon_t$, $t \in \mathbb{N}$, with an additive noise represented by independent centered…
The empirical distribution function assigns mass $1/n$ to each of the $n$ observations in a sample. As these are highly variable, estimation error may be reduced by replacing them with estimated observations that are asymptotically less…
The Good-Turing (GT) estimator for the missing mass (i.e., total probability of missing symbols) in $n$ samples is the number of symbols that appeared exactly once divided by $n$. For i.i.d. samples, the bias and squared-error risk of the…
We study the problem of estimating a distribution over a finite alphabet from an i.i.d. sample, with accuracy measured in relative entropy (Kullback-Leibler divergence). While optimal bounds on the expected risk are known, high-probability…
The paper suggests a simple method of deriving minimax lower bounds to the accuracy of statistical inference on heavy tails. A well-known result by Hall and Welsh (Ann. Statist. 12 (1984) 1079-1084) states that if $\hat{\alpha}_n$ is an…