Given a sample from a discretely observed Lévy process $X=(X_t)_{t\geq 0}$ of the finite jump activity, the problem of nonparametric estimation of the Lévy density $ρ$ corresponding to the process $X$ is studied. An estimator of $ρ$ is proposed that is based on a suitable inversion of the Lévy-Khintchine formula and a plug-in device. The main results of the paper deal with upper risk bounds for estimation of $ρ$ over suitable classes of Lévy triplets. The corresponding lower bounds are also discussed.
Given a discrete time sample $X_1,... X_n$ from a Lévy process $X=(X_t)_{t\geq 0}$ of a finite jump activity, we study the problem of nonparametric estimation of the characteristic triplet $(γ,σ^2,ρ)$ corresponding to the process $X.$ Based on Fourier inversion and kernel smoothing, we propose estimators of $γ,σ^2$ and $ρ$ and study their asymptotic behaviour. The obtained results include derivation of upper bounds on the mean square error of the estimators of $γ$ and $σ^2$ and an upper bound on the mean integrated square error of an estimator of $ρ.$
Consider a scalar reflected diffusion $(X_t:t\geq 0)$, where the unknown drift function $b$ is modelled nonparametrically. We show that in the low frequency sampling case, when the sample consists of $(X_0,X_Δ,...,X_{nΔ})$ for some fixed sampling distance $Δ>0$, the model satisfies the local asymptotic normality (LAN) property, assuming that $b$ satisfies some mild regularity assumptions. This is established by using the connections of diffusion processes to elliptic and parabolic PDEs. The key tools will be regularity estimates from the theory of parabolic PDEs as well as a detailed analysis …
Estimating parameters of drift and diffusion coefficients for multidimensional stochastic delay equations with small noise are considered. The delay structure is written as an integral form with respect to a delay measure. Our contrast function is based on a local-Gauss approximation to the transition probability density of the process. We show consistency and asymptotic normality of the minimum-contrast estimator when the dispersion coefficient goes to zero and the sample size goes to infinity, simultaneously.
A compound Poisson process whose parameters are all unknown is observed at finitely many equispaced times. Nonparametric estimators of the jump and Lévy distributions are proposed and functional central limit theorems using the uniform norm are proved for both under mild conditions. The limiting Gaussian processes are identified and efficiency of the estimators is established. Kernel estimators for the mass function, the intensity and the drift are also proposed, their asymptotic properties including efficiency are analysed, and joint asymptotic normality is shown. Inference tools such as conf…
We study the problem of estimating a mean pattern from a set of similar curves in the setting where the variability in the data is due to random geometric deformations and additive noise. We propose an estimator based on the notion of Frechet mean that is a generalization of the standard notion of averaging to non-Euclidean spaces. We derive a minimax rate for this estimation problem, and we show that our estimator achieves this optimal rate under the asymptotics where both the number of curves and the number of sampling points go to infinity.
The problem of estimating the mean of random functions based on discretely sampled data arises naturally in functional data analysis. In this paper, we study optimal estimation of the mean function under both common and independent designs. Minimax rates of convergence are established and easily implementable rate-optimal estimators are introduced. The analysis reveals interesting and different phase transition phenomena in the two cases. Under the common design, the sampling frequency solely determines the optimal rate of convergence when it is relatively small and the sampling frequency has …
Motivated by problems from statistical analysis for discretely sampled SPDEs, first we derive central limit theorems for higher order finite differences applied to stochastic process with arbitrary finitely regular paths. These results are proved by using the notion of $Δ$-power variations, introduced herein, along with the Hölder-Zygmund norms. Consequently, we prove a new central limit theorem for $Δ$-power variations of the iterated integrals of a fractional Brownian motion (fBm). These abstract results, besides being of independent interest, in the second part of the paper are applied to e…
We consider a parameter estimation problem for one dimensional stochastic heat equations, when data is sampled discretely in time or spatial component. We prove that, the real valued parameter next to the Laplacian (the drift), and the constant parameter in front of the noise (the volatility) can be consistently estimated under somewhat surprisingly minimal information. Namely, it is enough to observe the solution at a fixed time and on a discrete spatial grid, or at a fixed space point and at discrete time instances of a finite interval, assuming that the mesh-size goes to zero. The proposed …
We consider nonparametric statistical inference for Lévy processes sampled irregularly, at low frequency. The estimation of the jump dynamics as well as the estimation of the distributional density are investigated. Non-asymptotic risk bounds are derived and the corresponding rates of convergence are discussed under global as well as local regularity assumptions. Moreover, minimax optimality is proved for the estimator of the jump measure. Some numerical examples are given to illustrate the practical performance of the estimation procedure.
We study the nonparametric Nadaraya-Watson estimator of the drift function for ergodic stochastic processes driven by fractional Brownian motion of Hurst parameter H > 1/2. The estimator is based on the discretely observed stochastic processes. By using the ergodic properties and stochastic integral, we obtain the consistency of the proposed estimator.
The aim of this paper is to study the asymptotic properties of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of the drift coefficient for fractional stochastic heat equation driven by an additive space-time noise. We consider the traditional for stochastic partial differential equations statistical experiment when the measurements are performed in the spectral domain, and in contrast to the existing literature, we study the asymptotic properties of the maximum likelihood (type) estimators (MLE) when both, the number of Fourier modes and the time go to infinity. In the first part of the paper we consi…
Given a sample from a discretely observed compound Poisson process, we consider estimation of the density of the jump sizes. We propose a kernel type nonparametric density estimator and study its asymptotic properties. An order bound for the bias and an asymptotic expansion of the variance of the estimator are given. Pointwise weak consistency and asymptotic normality are established. The results show that, asymptotically, the estimator behaves very much like an ordinary kernel estimator.
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 can encounter in the functional setting. To remedy these deficiencies we introduce the first class of optimal robust location estimators based on discretely sampled functional data. The proposed method is based on M-type smoothing spline estimation with repeated measurements and is suitable for both commonly and independently observed trajectories that are su…
This work develops change-point methods for statistics of high-frequency data. The main interest is in the volatility of an Itô semi-martingale, the latter being discretely observed over a fixed time horizon. We construct a minimax-optimal test to discriminate continuous paths from paths comprising volatility jumps. This is embedded into a more general theory to infer the smoothness of volatilities. In a high-frequency framework we prove weak convergence of the test statistic under the hypothesis to an extreme value distribution. Moreover, we develop methods to infer changes in the Hurst param…
Nonparametric density estimation is considered for a discretely observed stationary continuous-time process. For each of three given time sampling procedures either random or deterministic, we establish that histograms and frequency polygons can reach the same optimal $L_{2}$-rates as in the independent and identically distributed case. Moreover, thanks to a suitable "high frequency" sampling design, these rates are derived together with a minimized time of observation depending on the regularity of sample paths.
In applications the properties of a stochastic feature often change gradually rather than abruptly, that is: after a constant phase for some time they slowly start to vary. In this paper we discuss statistical inference for the detection and the localisation of gradual changes in the jump characteristic of a discretely observed Ito semimartingale. We propose a new measure of time variation for the jump behaviour of the process. The statistical uncertainty of a corresponding estimate is analyzed by deriving new results on the weak convergence of a sequential empirical tail integral process and …
We study the nonparametric estimation of the jump density of a renewal reward process from one discretely observed sample path over [0,T]. We consider the regime when the sampling rate goes to 0. The main difficulty is that a renewal reward process is not a Levy process: the increments are non stationary and dependent. We propose an adaptive wavelet threshold density estimator and study its performance for the Lp loss over Besov spaces. We achieve minimax rates of convergence for sampling rates that vanish with T at polynomial rate. In the same spirit as Buchmann and Grübel (2003) and Duval (2…
Let X be a second order random process indexed by a compact interval [0,T]. Assume that n independent realizations of X are observed on a fixed grid of p time points. Under mild regularity assumptions on the sample paths of X, we show the asymptotic normality of suitable nonparametric estimators of the trend function mu = EX in the space C([0,T]) as n, p go to infinity and, using Gaussian process theory, we derive approximate simultaneous confidence bands for mu.
In the context of nonparametric regression, we study conditions under which the consistency (and rates of convergence) of estimators built from discretely sampled curves can be derived from the consistency of estimators based on the unobserved whole trajectories. As a consequence, we derive asymptotic results for most of the regularization techniques used in functional data analysis, including smoothing and basis representation.
We study Bayes procedures for the problem of nonparametric drift estimation for one-dimensional, ergodic diffusion models from discrete-time, low-frequency data. We give conditions for posterior consistency and verify these conditions for concrete priors, including priors based on wavelet expansions.
We study nonparametric density estimation problems where error is measured in the Wasserstein distance, a metric on probability distributions popular in many areas of statistics and machine learning. We give the first minimax-optimal rates for this problem for general Wasserstein distances, and show that, unlike classical nonparametric density estimation, these rates depend on whether the densities in question are bounded below. Motivated by variational problems involving the Wasserstein distance, we also show how to construct discretely supported measures, suitable for computational purposes,…
Stochastic volatility modelling of financial processes has become increasingly popular. The proposed models usually contain a stationary volatility process. We will motivate and review several nonparametric methods for estimation of the density of the volatility process. Both models based on discretely sampled continuous time processes and discrete time models will be discussed. The key insight for the analysis is a transformation of the volatility density estimation problem to a deconvolution model for which standard methods exist. Three type of nonparametric density estimators are reviewed: …
In longitudinal and spatial studies, observations often demonstrate strong correlations that are stationary in time or distance lags, and the times or locations of these data being sampled may not be homogeneous. We propose a nonparametric estimator of the correlation function in such data, using kernel methods. We develop a pointwise asymptotic normal distribution for the proposed estimator, when the number of subjects is fixed and the number of vectors or functions within each subject goes to infinity. Based on the asymptotic theory, we propose a weighted block bootstrapping method for makin…
We provide a nonparametric method for the computation of instantaneous multivariate volatility for continuous semi-martingales, which is based on Fourier analysis. The co-volatility is reconstructed as a stochastic function of time by establishing a connection between the Fourier transform of the prices process and the Fourier transform of the co-volatility process. A nonparametric estimator is derived given a discrete unevenly spaced and asynchronously sampled observations of the asset price processes. The asymptotic properties of the random estimator are studied: namely, consistency in proba…
We consider two kinds of stochastic volatility models. Both kinds of models contain a stationary volatility process, the density of which, at a fixed instant in time, we aim to estimate. We discuss discrete time models where for instance a log price process is modeled as the product of a volatility process and i.i.d. noise. We also consider samples of certain continuous time diffusion processes. The sampled time instants will be be equidistant with vanishing distance. A Fourier type deconvolution kernel density estimator based on the logarithm of the squared processes is proposed to estimate t…
We consider nonparametric Bayesian inference in a reflected diffusion model $dX_t = b (X_t)dt + σ(X_t) dW_t,$ with discretely sampled observations $X_0, X_Δ, \dots, X_{nΔ}$. We analyse the nonlinear inverse problem corresponding to the `low frequency sampling' regime where $Δ>0$ is fixed and $n \to \infty$. A general theorem is proved that gives conditions for prior distributions $Π$ on the diffusion coefficient $σ$ and the drift function $b$ that ensure minimax optimal contraction rates of the posterior distribution over Hölder-Sobolev smoothness classes. These conditions are verified for nat…
We introduce verifiable criteria for weak posterior consistency of identifiable Bayesian nonparametric inference for jump diffusions with unit diffusion coefficient and uniformly Lipschitz drift and jump coefficients in arbitrary dimension. The criteria are expressed in terms of coefficients of the SDEs describing the process, and do not depend on intractable quantities such as transition densities. We also show that products of discrete net and Dirichlet mixture model priors satisfy our conditions, again under an identifiability assumption. This generalises known results by incorporating jump…
In environmental applications of extreme value statistics, the underlying stochastic process is often modeled either as a max-stable process in continuous time/space or as a process in the domain of attraction of such a max-stable process. In practice, however, the processes are typically only observed at discrete points and one has to resort to interpolation to fill in the gaps. We discuss the influence of such an interpolation on estimators of marginal parameters as well as estimators of the exponent measure. In particular, natural conditions on the fineness of the observational scheme are d…
We derive consistent and asymptotically normal estimators for the drift and volatility parameters of the stochastic heat equation driven by an additive space-only white noise when the solution is sampled discretely in the physical domain. We consider both the full space and the bounded domain. We establish the exact spatial regularity of the solution, which in turn, using power-variation arguments, allows building the desired estimators. We show that naive approximations of the derivatives appearing in the power-variation based estimators may create nontrivial biases, which we compute explicit…
We consider the problem of the Bayesian inference of drift and diffusion coefficient functions in a stochastic differential equation given discrete observations of a realisation of its solution. We give conditions for the well-posedness and stable approximations of the posterior measure. These conditions in particular allow for priors with unbounded support. Our proof relies on the explicit construction of transition probability densities using the parametrix method for general parabolic equations. We then study an application of these results in inferring the rates of Birth-and-Death processe…
The spectral density function describes the second-order properties of a stationary stochastic process on $\mathbb{R}^d$. This paper considers the nonparametric estimation of the spectral density of a continuous-time stochastic process taking values in a separable Hilbert space. Our estimator is based on kernel smoothing and can be applied to a wide variety of spatial sampling schemes including those in which data are observed at irregular spatial locations. Thus, it finds immediate applications in Spatial Statistics, where irregularly sampled data naturally arise. The rates for the bias and v…
Given a sample from a discretely observed multidimensional compound Poisson process, we study the problem of nonparametric estimation of its jump size density $r_0$ and intensity $λ_0$. We take a nonparametric Bayesian approach to the problem and determine posterior contraction rates in this context, which, under some assumptions, we argue to be optimal posterior contraction rates. In particular, our results imply the existence of Bayesian point estimates that converge to the true parameter pair $(r_0,λ_0)$ at these rates. To the best of our knowledge, construction of nonparametric density est…
Donsker-type functional limit theorems are proved for empirical processes arising from discretely sampled increments of a univariate Lévy process. In the asymptotic regime the sampling frequencies increase to infinity and the limiting object is a Gaussian process that can be obtained from the composition of a Brownian motion with a covariance operator determined by the Lévy measure. The results are applied to derive the asymptotic distribution of natural estimators for the distribution function of the Lévy jump measure. As an application we deduce Kolmogorov-Smirnov type tests and confidence b…
Technische Universität Berlin（柏林工业大学）；Machine Learning Group（机器学习组）
While nonparametric density estimators often perform well on low dimensional data, their performance can suffer when applied to higher dimensional data, owing presumably to the curse of dimensionality. One technique for avoiding this is to assume no dependence between features and that the data are sampled from a separable density. This allows one to estimate each marginal distribution independently thereby avoiding the slow rates associated with estimating the full joint density. This is a strategy employed in naive Bayes models and is analogous to estimating a rank-one tensor. In this paper …
This paper proposes a widely applicable method of approximate maximum-likelihood estimation for multivariate diffusion process from discretely sampled data. A closed-form asymptotic expansion for transition density is proposed and accompanied by an algorithm containing only basic and explicit calculations for delivering any arbitrary order of the expansion. The likelihood function is thus approximated explicitly and employed in statistical estimation. The performance of our method is demonstrated by Monte Carlo simulations from implementing several examples, which represent a wide range of com…
The present paper deals with a nonparametric M-estimation for right censored regression model with stationary ergodic data. Defined as an implicit function, a kernel type estimator of a family of robust regression is considered when the covariate take its values in R^d (d >= 1) and the data are sampled from stationary ergodic process. The strong consistency (with rate) and the asymptotic distribution of the estimator are established under mild assumptions. Moreover, a usable confidence interval is provided which does not depend on any unknown quantity. Our results hold without any mixing condi…
A case-control family study is a study where individuals with a disease of interest (case probands) and individuals without the disease (control probands) are randomly sampled from a well-defined population. Possibly right-censored age at onset and disease status are observed for both probands and their relatives. Correlation among the outcomes within a family is induced by factors such as inherited genetic susceptibility, shared environment, and common behavior patterns. For this setting, we present a nonparametric estimator of the marginal survival function, based on local linear estimation …
We consider quasi maximum likelihood (QML) estimation for general non-Gaussian discrete-ime linear state space models and equidistantly observed multivariate Lévy-driven continuoustime autoregressive moving average (MCARMA) processes. In the discrete-time setting, we prove strong consistency and asymptotic normality of the QML estimator under standard moment assumptions and a strong-mixing condition on the output process of the state space model. In the second part of the paper, we investigate probabilistic and analytical properties of equidistantly sampled continuous-time state space models a…
This paper studies the identification of the Lévy jump measure of a discretely-sampled semimartingale. We define successive Blumenthal-Getoor indices of jump activity, and show that the leading index can always be identified, but that higher order indices are only identifiable if they are sufficiently close to the previous one, even if the path is fully observed. This result establishes a clear boundary on which aspects of the jump measure can be identified on the basis of discrete observations, and which cannot. We then propose an estimation procedure for the identifiable indices and compare …
We propose a new test to determine whether jumps are present in asset returns or other discretely sampled processes. As the sampling interval tends to 0, our test statistic converges to 1 if there are jumps, and to another deterministic and known value (such as 2) if there are no jumps. The test is valid for all Itô semimartingales, depends neither on the law of the process nor on the coefficients of the equation which it solves, does not require a preliminary estimation of these coefficients, and when there are jumps the test is applicable whether jumps have finite or infinite-activity and fo…
In this paper we discuss a closed-form approximation of the likelihood functions of an arbitrary diffusion process. The approximation is based on an exponential ansatz of the transition probability for a finite time step $Δt$, and a series expansion of the deviation of its logarithm from that of a Gaussian distribution. Through this procedure, dubbed {\em exponent expansion}, the transition probability is obtained as a power series in $Δt$. This becomes asymptotically exact if an increasing number of terms is included, and provides remarkably accurate results even when truncated to the first f…
We provide a general method to analyze the asymptotic properties of a variety of estimators of continuous time diffusion processes when the data are not only discretely sampled in time but the time separating successive observations may possibly be random. We introduce a new operator, the generalized infinitesimal generator, to obtain Taylor expansions of the asymptotic moments of the estimators. As a special case, our results apply to the situation where the data are discretely sampled at a fixed nonrandom time interval. We include as specific examples estimators based on maximum-likelihood a…
This paper presents the nonparametric inference for nonlinear volatility functionals of general multivariate Itô semimartingales, in high-frequency and noisy setting. Pre-averaging and truncation enable simultaneous handling of noise and jumps. Second-order expansion reveals explicit biases and a pathway to bias correction. Estimators based on this framework achieve the optimal convergence rate. A class of stable central limit theorems are attained with estimable asymptotic covariance matrices. This paper form a basis for infill asymptotic results of, for example, the realized Laplace transfor…
Given the importance of continuous-time stochastic volatility models to describe the dynamics of interest rates, we propose a goodness-of-fit test for the parametric form of the drift and diffusion functions, based on a marked empirical process of the residuals. The test statistics are constructed using a continuous functional (Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Cramér-von Mises) over the empirical processes. In order to evaluate the proposed tests, we implement a simulation study, where a bootstrap method is considered for the calibration of the tests. As the estimation of diffusion models with stochasti…
Given a sample of independent and identically distributed random variables, a novel nonparametric maximum entropy method is presented to estimate the underlying continuous univariate probability density function (pdf). Estimates are found by maximizing a log-likelihood function based on single order statistics after transforming through a sequence of trial cumulative distribution functions that iteratively improve using a Monte Carlo random search method. Improvement is quantified by assessing the random variables against the statistical properties of sampled uniform random data. Quality is de…
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University（纽约大学柯朗数学科学研究所）；Department of Mathematics, Stanford University（斯坦福大学数学系）；Department of Chemistry, Stanford University（斯坦福大学化学系）
Measuring training variability from stochastic optimization using robust nonparametric testing
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey（罗格斯大学（新泽西州立大学））；Pacific Northwest National Lab（太平洋西北国家实验室）；Pacific Northwest National Laboratory（太平洋西北国家实验室）；ARPA-H（美国高级卫生研究项目局）
