Related papers: Besting Good--Turing: Optimality of Non-Parametric…
The problem of estimating discovery probabilities originated in the context of statistical ecology, and in recent years it has become popular due to its frequent appearance in challenging applications arising in genetics, bioinformatics,…
Nonparametric empirical Bayes methods provide a flexible and attractive approach to high-dimensional data analysis. One particularly elegant empirical Bayes methodology, involving the Kiefer-Wolfowitz nonparametric maximum likelihood…
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,…
Large sample size equivalence between the celebrated {\it approximated} Good-Turing estimator of the probability to discover a species already observed a certain number of times (Good, 1953) and the modern Bayesian nonparametric counterpart…
Estimating a large alphabet probability distribution from a limited number of samples is a fundamental problem in machine learning and statistics. A variety of estimation schemes have been proposed over the years, mostly inspired by the…
We study mixture of linear regression (random coefficient) models, which capture population heterogeneity by allowing the regression coefficients to follow an unknown distribution $G^*$. In contrast to common parametric methods that fix the…
Nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation is intended to infer the unknown density distribution while making as few assumptions as possible. To alleviate the over parameterization in nonparametric data fitting, smoothing assumptions are…
This paper derives the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator (NPMLE) of a distribution function from observations which are subject to both bias and censoring. The NPMLE is obtained by a simple EM algorithm which is an extension of the…
We consider an original problem that arises from the issue of security analysis of a power system and that we name optimal discovery with probabilistic expert advice. We address it with an algorithm based on the optimistic paradigm and the…
We investigate a data-driven approach to constructing uncertainty sets for robust optimization problems, where the uncertain problem parameters are modeled as random variables whose joint probability distribution is not known. Relying only…
Parameter estimation is one of the most important tasks in statistics, and is key to helping people understand the distribution behind a sample of observations. Traditionally parameter estimation is done either by closed-form solutions…
In this paper we study the computation of the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator (NPMLE) in multivariate mixture models. Our first approach discretizes this infinite dimensional convex optimization problem by fixing the support…
Introduced by Kiefer and Wolfowitz \cite{KW56}, the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator (NPMLE) is a widely used methodology for learning mixture odels and empirical Bayes estimation. Sidestepping the non-convexity in mixture…
We consider an original problem that arises from the issue of security analysis of a power system and that we name optimal discovery with probabilistic expert advice. We address it with an algorithm based on the optimistic paradigm and on…
The likelihood function is a fundamental component in Bayesian statistics. However, evaluating the likelihood of an observation is computationally intractable in many applications. In this paper, we propose a non-parametric approximation of…
When dealing with Bayesian inference the choice of the prior often remains a debatable question. Empirical Bayes methods offer a data-driven solution to this problem by estimating the prior itself from an ensemble of data. In the…
Suppose we observe a geometrically ergodic semi-Markov process and have a parametric model for the transition distribution of the embedded Markov chain, for the conditional distribution of the inter-arrival times, or for both. The first two…
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…
Expectation Maximization (EM) is among the most popular algorithms for maximum likelihood estimation, but it is generally only guaranteed to find its stationary points of the log-likelihood objective. The goal of this article is to present…
Objectives: Highly flexible nonparametric estimators have gained popularity in causal inference and epidemiology. Popular examples of such estimators include targeted maximum likelihood estimators (TMLE) and double machine learning (DML).…