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We revisit empirical Bayes in the absence of a tractable likelihood function, as is typical in scientific domains relying on computer simulations. We investigate how the empirical Bayesian can make use of neural density estimators first to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-03-02 Maxime Vandegar , Michael Kagan , Antoine Wehenkel , Gilles Louppe

In this work, we investigate Gaussian Mixture Models ({\it abbrv} GMM) and the related problem of non parametric maximum likelihood estimation ({\it abbrv} NPMLE) from the perspective of statistical mechanics. In particular, we establish…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-03-25 Subhroshekhar Ghosh , Adityanand Guntuboyina , Satyaki Mukherjee , Hoang-Son Tran

Empirical Bayes (EB) is a popular framework for large-scale inference that aims to find data-driven estimators to compete with the Bayesian oracle that knows the true prior. Two principled approaches to EB estimation have emerged over the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-11-21 Yandi Shen , Yihong Wu

In the sparse normal means model, convergence of the Bayesian posterior distribution associated to spike and slab prior distributions is considered. The key sparsity hyperparameter is calibrated via marginal maximum likelihood empirical…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-10-17 Ismaël Castillo , Romain Mismer

The aim of this note is to state a couple of general results about the properties of the penalized maximum likelihood estimators (pMLE) and of the posterior distribution for parametric models in a non-asymptotic setup and for possibly large…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-12-13 Vladimir Spokoiny

This paper studies the sparse normal mean models under the empirical Bayes framework. We focus on the mixture priors with an atom at zero and a density component centered at a data driven location determined by maximizing the marginal…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-02-20 Xianyang Zhang , Anirban Bhattacharya

We propose a general maximum likelihood empirical Bayes (GMLEB) method for the estimation of a mean vector based on observations with i.i.d. normal errors. We prove that under mild moment conditions on the unknown means, the average mean…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2009-08-13 Wenhua Jiang , Cun-Hui Zhang

Histogram-based empirical Bayes methods developed for analyzing data for large numbers of genes, SNPs, or other biological features tend to have large biases when applied to data with a smaller number of features such as genes with…

Methodology · Statistics 2013-10-10 Marta Padilla , David R. Bickel

Consider the Gaussian sequence model under the additional assumption that a fixed fraction of the means is known. We study the problem of variance estimation from a frequentist Bayesian perspective. The maximum likelihood estimator (MLE)…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-12-19 Gianluca Finocchio , Johannes Schmidt-Hieber

Empirical Bayes methods can improve inference on unobservable individual effects by borrowing strength across units. This paper proposes nonparametric empirical Bayes confidence intervals (NP-EBCIs) for unobservable individual effects in a…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-12 Zhen Xie

Empirical likelihood is a popular nonparametric statistical tool that does not require any distributional assumptions. In this paper, we explore the possibility of conducting variable selection via Bayesian empirical likelihood. We show…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-06-13 Yichen Cheng , Yichuan Zhao

Efficient Bayesian model selection relies on the model evidence or marginal likelihood, whose computation often requires evaluating an intractable integral. The harmonic mean estimator (HME) has long been a standard method of approximating…

Computation · Statistics 2025-12-23 Dana Naderi , Christian P Robert , Kaniav Kamary , Darren Wraith

We consider distributed estimation of the inverse covariance matrix, also called the concentration or precision matrix, in Gaussian graphical models. Traditional centralized estimation often requires global inference of the covariance…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-06-15 Zhaoshi Meng , Dennis Wei , Ami Wiesel , Alfred O. Hero

This paper explores a class of empirical Bayes methods for level-dependent threshold selection in wavelet shrinkage. The prior considered for each wavelet coefficient is a mixture of an atom of probability at zero and a heavy-tailed…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2007-06-13 Iain M. Johnstone , Bernard W. Silverman

We study Bayesian inference methods for solving linear inverse problems, focusing on hierarchical formulations where the prior or the likelihood function depend on unspecified hyperparameters. In practice, these hyperparameters are often…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2018-08-01 Qingping Zhou , Wenqing Liu , Jinglai Li , Youssef M. Marzouk

An empirical Bayes approach to the estimation of possibly sparse sequences observed in Gaussian white noise is set out and investigated. The prior considered is a mixture of an atom of probability at zero and a heavy-tailed density \gamma,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2007-06-13 Iain M. Johnstone , Bernard W. Silverman

Given a collection of observed signals corrupted with Gaussian noise, how can we learn to optimally denoise them? This fundamental problem arises in both empirical Bayes and generative modeling. In empirical Bayes, the predominant approach…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-09-25 Sulagna Ghosh , Nikolaos Ignatiadis , Frederic Koehler , Amber Lee

In the sparse normal means model, coverage of adaptive Bayesian posterior credible sets associated to spike and slab prior distributions is considered. The key sparsity hyperparameter is calibrated via marginal maximum likelihood empirical…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-02-05 Ismael Castillo , Botond Szabo

We consider the problem of recovering a distribution function on the real line from observations additively contaminated with errors following the standard Laplace distribution. Assuming that the latent distribution is completely unknown…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-08-21 Catia Scricciolo

Mixture models are regularly used in density estimation applications, but the problem of estimating the mixing distribution remains a challenge. Nonparametric maximum likelihood produce estimates of the mixing distribution that are…

Computation · Statistics 2019-06-28 Minwoo Chae , Ryan Martin , Stephen G. Walker