Related papers: Estimation of discrete distributions with high pro…
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…
We analyze the problem of discrete distribution estimation under $\ell_1$ loss. We provide non-asymptotic upper and lower bounds on the maximum risk of the empirical distribution (the maximum likelihood estimator), and the minimax risk in…
We present a novel approach to estimating discrete distributions with (potentially) infinite support in the total variation metric. In a departure from the established paradigm, we make no structural assumptions whatsoever on the sampling…
We study and compare three estimators of a discrete monotone distribution: (a) the (raw) empirical estimator; (b) the "method of rearrangements" estimator; and (c) the maximum likelihood estimator. We show that the maximum likelihood…
We study the minimax estimation of $\alpha$-divergences between discrete distributions for integer $\alpha\ge 1$, which include the Kullback--Leibler divergence and the $\chi^2$-divergences as special examples. Dropping the usual…
We study statistical estimation under local differential privacy (LDP) when users may hold heterogeneous privacy levels and accuracy must be guaranteed with high probability. Departing from the common in-expectation analyses, and for…
We consider the problem of estimating the mean of a distribution supported by the $k$-dimensional probability simplex in the setting where an $\varepsilon$ fraction of observations are subject to adversarial corruption. A simple particular…
We study the fundamental task of estimating the median of an underlying distribution from a finite number of samples, under pure differential privacy constraints. We focus on distributions satisfying the minimal assumption that they have a…
Dirichlet distributions are probability measures on the unit simplex. They are often used as prior distributions in modeling categorical data, such as in topic analysis of text data. Motivated by this application, we consider Monte Carlo…
We give a comprehensive theoretical characterization of a nonparametric estimator for the $L_2^2$ divergence between two continuous distributions. We first bound the rate of convergence of our estimator, showing that it is…
We develop and analyze $M$-estimation methods for divergence functionals and the likelihood ratios of two probability distributions. Our method is based on a non-asymptotic variational characterization of $f$-divergences, which allows the…
Estimation and prediction problems for dense signals are often framed in terms of minimax problems over highly symmetric parameter spaces. In this paper, we study minimax problems over l2-balls for high-dimensional linear models with…
We propose and analyze algorithms for distributionally robust optimization of convex losses with conditional value at risk (CVaR) and $\chi^2$ divergence uncertainty sets. We prove that our algorithms require a number of gradient…
Non-parametric estimation of a convex discrete distribution may be of interest in several applications, such as the estimation of species abundance distribution in ecology. In this paper we study the least squares estimator of a discrete…
We consider the fundamental problem of estimating a discrete distribution on a domain of size $K$ with high probability in Kullback-Leibler divergence. We provide upper and lower bounds on the minimax estimation rate, which show that the…
We consider the minimax estimation problem of a discrete distribution with support size $k$ under locally differential privacy constraints. A privatization scheme is applied to each raw sample independently, and we need to estimate the…
Statistical inference for discrete time observations of an affine stochastic delay differential equation is considered. The main focus is on maximum pseudo-likelihood estimators, which are easy to calculate in practice. A more general class…
Large data sets often require performing distributed statistical estimation, with a full data set split across multiple machines and limited communication between machines. To study such scenarios, we define and study some refinements of…
We revisit the classical problem of nonparametric density estimation but impose local differential privacy constraints. Under such constraints, the original multivariate data $X_1,\ldots,X_n \in \mathbb{R}^d$ cannot be directly observed,…
In this paper, we develop a non-asymptotic local normal approximation for multinomial probabilities. First, we use it to find non-asymptotic total variation bounds between the measures induced by uniformly jittered multinomials and the…