Related papers: Problems with Fitting to the Power-Law Distributio…
The advent of data science has spurred interest in estimating properties of distributions over large alphabets. Fundamental symmetric properties such as support size, support coverage, entropy, and proximity to uniformity, received most…
A number of applications (e.g., AI bot tournaments, sports, peer grading, crowdsourcing) use pairwise comparison data and the Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model to evaluate a given collection of items (e.g., bots, teams, students, search…
The linear regression model with a random variable (RV) measurement matrix, where the mean of the random measurement matrix has full column rank, has been extensively studied. In particular, the quasiconvexity of the maximum likelihood…
We propose tests of fit for classes of distributions that include the Weibull, the Pareto and the Fr\'echet, distributions. The new tests employ the novel tool of the min--characteristic function and are based on an L2--type weighted…
According to standard econometric theory, Maximum Likelihood estimation (MLE) is the efficient estimation choice, however, it is not always a feasible one. In network diffusion models with unobserved signal propagation, MLE requires…
Classical tests of fit typically reject a model for large enough real data samples. In contrast, often in statistical practice a model offers a good description of the data even though it is not the "true" random generator. We consider a…
We study three fundamental statistical-learning problems: distribution estimation, property estimation, and property testing. We establish the profile maximum likelihood (PML) estimator as the first unified sample-optimal approach to a wide…
Traditionally power distribution networks are either not observable or only partially observable. This complicates development and implementation of new smart grid technologies, such as those related to demand response, outage detection and…
Linear mixed effects models (LMMs) are a popular and powerful tool for analyzing clustered or repeated observations for numeric outcomes. LMMs consist of a fixed and a random component, specified in the model through their respective design…
We propose a new and rather stringent criterion for testing the goodness of fit between a theory and experiment. It is motivated by the paradox that the criterion on \chi^2 for testing a theory is much weaker than the criterion for finding…
We consider the problem of estimating the distribution function, the density and the hazard rate of the (unobservable) event time in the current status model. A well studied and natural nonparametric estimator for the distribution function…
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…
Identifying the statistical distribution that best fits citation data is important to allow robust and powerful quantitative analyses. Whilst previous studies have suggested that both the hooked power law and discretised lognormal…
We introduce a new statistical test based on the observed spacings of ordered data. The statistic is sensitive to detect non-uniformity in random samples, or short-lived features in event time series. Under some conditions, this new test…
Shape constraints yield flexible middle grounds between fully nonparametric and fully parametric approaches to modeling distributions of data. The specific assumption of log-concavity is motivated by applications across economics, survival…
Modern foundation models rely heavily on using scaling laws to guide crucial training decisions. Researchers often extrapolate the optimal architecture and hyper parameters settings from smaller training runs by describing the relationship…
A type of dynamic network involves temporally ordered interactions between actors, where past network configurations may influence future ones. The relational event model can be used to identify the underlying dynamics that drive…
A key object of study in stochastic topology is a random simplicial complex. In this work we study a multi-parameter random simplicial complex model, where the probability of including a $k$-simplex, given the lower dimensional structure,…
Learning the structure of Markov random fields (MRFs) plays an important role in multivariate analysis. The importance has been increasing with the recent rise of statistical relational models since the MRF serves as a building block of…
Suppose we are given observations, where each observation is drawn independently from one of $k$ known distributions. The goal is to match each observation to the distribution from which it was drawn. We observe that the maximum likelihood…