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Penalties that induce smoothness are common in nonparametric regression. In many settings, the amount of smoothness in the data generating function will not be known. Simon and Shojaie (2021) derived convergence rates for nonparametric…
We study the minimax estimation of covariance eigenfunctions and eigenvalues in functional principal component analysis when $n$ trajectories are observed at $p$ common grid points with additive noise. We consider covariance kernels with…
Non-parametric estimation of functions as well as their derivatives by means of local-polynomial regression is a subject that was studied in the literature since the late 1970's. Given a set of noisy samples of a $\mathcal{C}^k$ smooth…
Estimating location is a central problem in functional data analysis, yet most current estimation procedures either unrealistically assume completely observed trajectories or lack robustness with respect to the many kinds of anomalies one…
Variance function estimation in nonparametric regression is considered and the minimax rate of convergence is derived. We are particularly interested in the effect of the unknown mean on the estimation of the variance function. Our results…
There has been substantial recent work on methods for estimating the slope function in linear regression for functional data analysis. However, as in the case of more conventional finite-dimensional regression, much of the practical…
This paper tackles the unconstrained minimization of a class of nonsmooth and nonconvex functions that can be written as finite max-functions. A gradient and function-based sampling method is proposed which, under special circumstances,…
Estimation of convex functions finds broad applications in engineering and science, while convex shape constraint gives rise to numerous challenges in asymptotic performance analysis. This paper is devoted to minimax optimal estimation of…
In this paper, we address stochastic optimization problems involving a composition of a non-smooth outer function and a smooth inner function, a formulation frequently encountered in machine learning and operations research. To deal with…
We describe a method for approximating a single-variable function $f$ using persistence diagrams of sublevel sets of $f$ from height functions in different directions. We provide algorithms for the piecewise linear case and for the smooth…
Kernel quadrature is widely used to approximate integrals of smooth functions, with worst-case error typically decaying at the minimax rate $n^{-\alpha/d}$ for smoothness $\alpha$ in dimension $d$. Existing rate-optimal methods often depend…
We propose a new stochastic gradient method for optimizing the sum of a finite set of smooth functions, where the sum is strongly convex. While standard stochastic gradient methods converge at sublinear rates for this problem, the proposed…
Motivated by portfolio allocation and linear discriminant analysis, we consider estimating a functional $\mathbf{\mu}^T \mathbf{\Sigma}^{-1} \mathbf{\mu}$ involving both the mean vector $\mathbf{\mu}$ and covariance matrix…
We revisit the classical problem of finding an approximately stationary point of the average of $n$ smooth and possibly nonconvex functions. The optimal complexity of stochastic first-order methods in terms of the number of gradient…
We consider smooth stochastic convex optimization problems in the context of algorithms which are based on directional derivatives of the objective function. This context can be considered as an intermediate one between derivative-free…
We perform the first tight convergence analysis of the gradient method with varying step sizes when applied to smooth hypoconvex (weakly convex) functions. Hypoconvex functions are smooth nonconvex functions whose curvature is bounded and…
We analyze convergence rates of stochastic optimization procedures for non-smooth convex optimization problems. By combining randomized smoothing techniques with accelerated gradient methods, we obtain convergence rates of stochastic…
In this paper, we propose a proximal gradient method and an accelerated proximal gradient method for solving composite optimization problems, where the objective function is the sum of a smooth and a convex, possibly nonsmooth, function. We…
We consider the global minimization of smooth functions based solely on function evaluations. Algorithms that achieve the optimal number of function evaluations for a given precision level typically rely on explicitly constructing an…
We consider the problem of optimizing the sum of a smooth convex function and a non-smooth convex function using proximal-gradient methods, where an error is present in the calculation of the gradient of the smooth term or in the proximity…