Related papers: Score-Preserving Targeted Maximum Likelihood Estim…

Variable importance is one of the most widely used measures for interpreting machine learning with significant interest from both statistics and machine learning communities. Recently, increasing attention has been directed toward…

Modeling sparse data such as microbiome and transcriptomics (RNA-seq) data is very challenging due to the exceeded number of zeros and skewness of the distribution. Many probabilistic models have been used for modeling sparse data,…

Score matching is an alternative to maximum likelihood (ML) for estimating a probability distribution parametrized up to a constant of proportionality. By fitting the ''score'' of the distribution, it sidesteps the need to compute this…

This paper studies parameter estimation using L-moments, an alternative to traditional moments with attractive statistical properties. The estimation of model parameters by matching sample L-moments is known to outperform maximum likelihood…

We consider a one dimensional sub-ballistic random walk evolving in a parametric i.i.d. random environment. We study the asymptotic properties of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of the parameter based on a single observation of the…

Distributed statistical inference has recently attracted immense attention. The asymptotic efficiency of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE), the one-step MLE, and the aggregated estimating equation estimator are established for…

We introduce a trimmed version of the Hill estimator for the index of a heavy-tailed distribution, which is robust to perturbations in the extreme order statistics. In the ideal Pareto setting, the estimator is essentially finite-sample…

When faced with a small sample from a large universe of possible outcomes, scientists often turn to the venerable Good--Turing estimator. Despite its pedigree, however, this estimator comes with considerable drawbacks, such as the need to…

The standard paradigm of neural language generation adopts maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) as the optimizing method. From a distributional view, MLE in fact minimizes the Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD) between the distribution of the…

Misclassification of binary responses, if ignored, may severely bias the maximum likelihood estimators (MLE) of regression parameters. For such data, a binary regression model incorporating misclassification probabilities is extensively…

Replicating causal estimates across different cohorts is crucial for increasing the integrity of epidemiological studies. However, strong assumptions regarding unmeasured confounding and effect modification often hinder this goal. By…

For estimating the proportion of false null hypotheses in multiple testing, a family of estimators by Storey (2002) is widely used in the applied and statistical literature, with many methods suggested for selecting the parameter $\lambda$.…

With the onset of large language models (LLMs), the performance of artificial intelligence (AI) models is becoming increasingly multi-dimensional. Accordingly, there have been several large, multi-dimensional evaluation frameworks put…

Accumulated Local Effect (ALE) is a method for accurately estimating feature effects, overcoming fundamental failure modes of previously-existed methods, such as Partial Dependence Plots. However, ALE's approximation, i.e. the method for…

Value-based reinforcement-learning algorithms have shown strong results in games, robotics, and other real-world applications. Overestimation bias is a known threat to those algorithms and can sometimes lead to dramatic performance…

This paper develops a unified estimation framework, the Maximum Ideal Likelihood Estimation (MILE), for general parametric models with latent variables. Unlike traditional approaches relying on the marginal likelihood of the observed data,…

Direct preference optimization methods have emerged as a computationally efficient alternative to Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs). Latest approaches have streamlined the alignment…

We study nonparametric estimation of the sub-distribution functions for current status data with competing risks. Our main interest is in the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator (MLE), and for comparison we also consider a simpler…

Linear birth-and-death processes (LBDPs) are foundational stochastic models in population dynamics, evolutionary biology, and hematopoiesis. Estimating parameters from discretely observed data is computationally demanding due to irregular…

We study three estimators for the interval censoring case 2 problem, a histogram-type estimator, proposed in Birg\'e (1999), the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) and the smoothed MLE, using a smoothing kernel. Our focus is on the…