We consider the problem of parameter estimation for an ergodic diffusion with Fisher-Snedecor invariant distribution, to be called Fisher-Snedecor diffusion. We compute the spectral representation of its transition density, which involves a finite number of discrete eigenfunctions (Fisher-Snedecor polynomials) as well as a continuous part. We propose moments based estimators (related to the Fisher-Snedecor polynomials) and prove their consistency and asymptotic normality. Furthermore, we propose a statistical test for the distributional assumptions on the marginal distribution of the Fisher-Snedecor diffusion, based on the moment condition derived from the corresponding Stein's equation.
We consider the Fisher-Snedecor diffusion; that is, the Kolmogorov-Pearson diffusion with the Fisher-Snedecor invariant distribution. In the nonstationary setting, we give explicit quantitative rates for the convergence rate of respective finite-dimensional distributions to that of the stationary Fisher-Snedecor diffusion, and for the $β$-mixing coefficient of this diffusion. As an application, we prove the law of large numbers and the central limit theorem for additive functionals of the Fisher-Snedecor diffusion and construct $P$-consistent and asymptotically normal estimators for the parame…
In many statistical applications that concern mathematical psychologists, the concept of Fisher information plays an important role. In this tutorial we clarify the concept of Fisher information as it manifests itself across three different statistical paradigms. First, in the frequentist paradigm, Fisher information is used to construct hypothesis tests and confidence intervals using maximum likelihood estimators; second, in the Bayesian paradigm, Fisher information is used to define a default prior; lastly, in the minimum description length paradigm, Fisher information is used to measure mod…
Fisher's Method of Maximum Likelihood is shown to be a procedure for the construction of likelihood intervals or regions, instead of a procedure of point estimation. Based on Fisher's articles and books it is justified that by estimation Fisher meant the construction of likelihood intervals or regions from appropriate likelihood function and that an estimate is a statistic, that is, a function from a sample space to a parameter space such that the likelihood function obtained from the sampling distribution of the statistic at the observed value of the statistic is used to construct likelihood …
The Nile problem by Ronald Fisher may be interpreted as the problem of making statistical inference for a special curved exponential family when the minimal sufficient statistic is incomplete. The problem itself and its versions for general curved exponential families pose a mathematical-statistical challenge: studying the subalgebras of ancillary statistics within the $σ$-algebra of the (incomplete) minimal sufficient statistics and closely related questions of the structure of UMVUEs. In this paper a new method is developed that, in particular, proves that in the classical Nile problem no st…
In this paper I discuss the relation between the concept of the Fisher metric and the concept of differentiability of a family of probability measures. I compare the concepts of smooth statistical manifolds, differentiable families of measures, $k$-integrable parameterized measure models, diffeological statistical models, differentiable measures, which arise in Information Geometry, mathematical statistics and measure theory, and discuss some related problems.
Maximum likelihood estimates and corresponding confidence regions of the estimates are commonly used in statistical inference. In practice, people often construct approximate confidence regions with the Fisher information at given sample data based on the asymptotic normal distribution of the MLE (maximum likelihood estimate). Two common Fisher information matrices (FIMs, for multivariate parameters) are the observed FIM (the Hessian matrix of negative log-likelihood function) and the expected FIM (the expectation of the observed FIM). In this article, we prove that under certain conditions an…
Random Fisher matrices arise naturally in multivariate statistical analysis and understanding the properties of its eigenvalues is of primary importance for many hypothesis testing problems like testing the equality between two multivariate population covariance matrices, or testing the independence between sub-groups of a multivariate random vector. This paper is concerned with the properties of a large-dimensional Fisher matrix when the dimension of the population is proportionally large compared to the sample size. Most of existing works on Fisher matrices deal with a particular Fisher matr…
We consider the processing of statistical samples $X\sim P_θ$ by a channel $p(y|x)$, and characterize how the statistical information from the samples for estimating the parameter $θ\in\mathbb{R}^d$ can scale with the mutual information or capacity of the channel. We show that if the statistical model has a sub-Gaussian score function, then the trace of the Fisher information matrix for estimating $θ$ from $Y$ can scale at most linearly with the mutual information between $X$ and $Y$. We apply this result to obtain minimax lower bounds in distributed statistical estimation problems, and obtain…
We derive a probability distribution, confidence intervals and statistics of the quality (Q) factor of an arbitrarily shaped mode-stirred reverberation chamber, based on ensemble distributions of the idealized random cavity field with assumed perfect stir efficiency. It is shown that Q exhibits a Fisher-Snedecor F-distribution whose degrees of freedom are governed by the number of simultaneously excited cavity modes per stir state. The most probable value of Q is between a fraction 2/9 and 1 of its mean value, and between a fraction 4/9 and 1 of its asymptotic (composite Q) value. The arithmet…
We consider the statistical analysis of data on high-dimensional spheres and shape spaces. The work is of particular relevance to applications where high-dimensional data are available--a commonly encountered situation in many disciplines. First the uniform measure on the infinite-dimensional sphere is reviewed, together with connections with Wiener measure. We then discuss densities of Gaussian measures with respect to Wiener measure. Some nonuniform distributions on infinite-dimensional spheres and shape spaces are introduced, and special cases which have important practical consequences are…
R. A. Fisher founded modern statistical inference in 1922 and identified its fundamental problems to be: specification, estimation and distribution. Since then the problem of statistical model specification has received scant attention in the statistics literature. The paper traces the history of statistical model specification, focusing primarily on pioneers like Fisher, Neyman, and more recently Lehmann and Cox, and attempts a synthesis of their views in the context of the Probabilistic Reduction (PR) approach. As argued by Lehmann [11], a major stumbling block for a general approach to stat…
In this paper, first, we survey the concept of diffeological Fisher metric and its naturality, using functorial language of probability morphisms, and slightly extending Lê's theory in \cite{Le2020} to include weakly $C^k$-diffeological statistical models. Then we introduce the resulting notions of the diffeological Fisher distance, the diffeological Hausdorff--Jeffrey measure and explain their role in classical and Bayesian nonparametric estimation problems in statistics.
We review basic notions in the field of information geometry such as Fisher metric on statistical manifold, $α$-connection and corresponding curvature following Amari's work . We show application of information geometry to asymptotic statistical inference.
Information geometry provides a geometric approach to families of statistical models. The key geometric structures are the Fisher quadratic form and the Amari-Chentsov tensor. In statistics, the notion of sufficient statistic expresses the criterion for passing from one model to another without loss of information. This leads to the question how the geometric structures behave under such sufficient statistics. While this is well studied in the finite sample size case, in the infinite case, we encounter technical problems concerning the appropriate topologies. Here, we introduce notions of para…
We derive the sampling probability density function (pdf) of an ideal localized random electromagnetic field, its amplitude and intensity in an electromagnetic environment that is quasi-statically time-varying statistically homogeneous or static statistically inhomogeneous. The results allow for the estimation of field statistics and confidence intervals when a single spatial or temporal stochastic process produces randomization of the field. Results for both coherent and incoherent detection techniques are derived, for Cartesian, planar and full-vectorial fields. We show that the functional f…
A number of discrete time, finite population size models in genetics describing the dynamics of allele frequencies are known to converge (subject to suitable scaling) to a diffusion process in the infinite population limit, termed the Wright-Fisher diffusion. In this article we show that the diffusion is ergodic uniformly in the selection and mutation parameters, and that the measures induced by the solution to the stochastic differential equation are uniformly locally asymptotically normal. Subsequently these two results are used to analyse the statistical properties of the Maximum Likelihood…
Based on the negative binomial model for the duration of wet periods measured in days, an asymptotic approximation is proposed for the distribution of the maximum daily precipitation volume within a wet period. This approximation has the form of a scale mixture of the Frechet distribution with the gamma mixing distribution and coincides with the distribution of a positive power of a random variable having the Snedecor-Fisher distribution. The proof of this result is based on the representation of the negative binomial distribution as a mixed geometric (and hence, mixed Poisson) distribution an…
The Fisher Information matrix is a widely used measure for applications ranging from statistical inference, information geometry, experiment design, to the study of criticality in biological systems. Yet there is no commonly accepted non-parametric algorithm to estimate it from real data. In this rapid communication we show how to accurately estimate the Fisher information in a nonparametric way. We also develop a numerical procedure to minimize the errors by choosing the interval of the finite difference scheme necessary to compute the derivatives in the definition of the Fisher information. …
The Fisher information matrix (FIM) is a foundational concept in statistical signal processing. The FIM depends on the probability distribution, assumed to belong to a smooth parametric family. Traditional approaches to estimating the FIM require estimating the probability distribution function (PDF), or its parameters, along with its gradient or Hessian. However, in many practical situations the PDF of the data is not known but the statistician has access to an observation sample for any parameter value. Here we propose a method of estimating the FIM directly from sampled data that does not r…
Meta-analysis is a statistical method to combine results from multiple clinical or genomic studies with the same or similar research problems. It has been widely use to increase statistical power in finding clinical or genomic differences among different groups. One major category of meta-analysis is combining p-values from independent studies and the Fisher's method is one of the most commonly used statistical methods. However, due to heterogeneity of studies, particularly in the field of genomic research, with thousands of features such as genes to assess, researches often desire to discover…
In this note we introduce the notion of a $C^k$-diffeological statistical model, which allows us to apply the theory of diffeological spaces to (possibly singular) statistical models. In particular, we introduce a class of almost 2-integrable $C^k$-diffeological statistical models that encompasses all known statistical models for which the Fisher metric is defined. This class contains a statistical model which does not appear in the Ay-Jost-Lê-Schwachhöfer theory of parametrized measure models. Then we show that for any positive integer $k$ the class of almost 2-integrable $C^k$-diffeological …
Under a multinormal distribution with arbitrary unknown covariance matrix, the main purpose of this paper is to propose a framework to achieve the goal of reconciliation of Bayesian, frequentist and Fisherian paradigms for the problems of testing mean against restricted alternatives (closed convex cones). Combining Fisher's fiducial inference and Wald's decision theory via d-admissibility into an unified approach, the goal can then be achieved. To proceed, the tests constructed via the union-intersection principle are studied.
The basic properties of the Fisher information allow to reveal the statistical meaning of classical inequalities between mean functions. The properties applied to scale mixtures of Gaussian distributions lead to a new mean function of purely statistical origin, unrelated to the classical arithmetic, geometric, and harmonic means. We call it the informational mean and show that when the arguments of the mean functions are Hermitian positive definite matrices, not necessarily commuting, the informational mean lies between the arithmetic and harmonic means, playing, in a sense, the role of the ge…
The Fisher information matrix (FIM) plays an important role in the analysis of parameter inference and system design problems. In a number of cases, however, the statistical data distribution and its associated information matrix are either unknown or intractable. For this reason, it is of interest to develop useful lower bounds on the FIM. In this lecture note, we derive such a bound based on moment constraints. We call this bound the Pearson information matrix (PIM) and relate it to properties of a misspecified data distribution. Finally, we show that the inverse PIM coincides with the asymp…
The Behrens-Fisher problem concerns testing the equality of the means of two normal populations with possibly different variances. The null hypothesis in this problem induces a statistical model for which the likelihood function may have more than one local maximum. We show that such multimodality contradicts the null hypothesis in the sense that if this hypothesis is true then the probability of multimodality converges to zero when both sample sizes tend to infinity. Additional results include a finite-sample bound on the probability of multimodality under the null and asymptotics for the pro…
Probability distributions in Stiefel manifold such as the von-Mises Fisher and Bingham distributions find diverse applications in signal processing and other applied sciences. Use of these statistical models in practice is complicated by the difficulties in numerical evaluation of their normalization constants. In this letter, we derive asymptotical approximations to the normalization constants via recent results in random matrix theory. The derived approximations take simple forms and are reasonably accurate in regimes of practical interest. As an application, we show that the proposed analyt…
The Fisher-Rao geodesic distance on the statistical manifold consisting of zero-mean p-dimensional multivariate Gaussians appears without proof in several places (such as Steven Smith's "Covariance, Subspace, and Intrinsic Cramer-Rao Bounds"). In this paper, we give a proof using basic Riemannian geometry.
We develop data processing inequalities that describe how Fisher information from statistical samples can scale with the privacy parameter $\varepsilon$ under local differential privacy constraints. These bounds are valid under general conditions on the distribution of the score of the statistical model, and they elucidate under which conditions the dependence on $\varepsilon$ is linear, quadratic, or exponential. We show how these inequalities imply order optimal lower bounds for private estimation for both the Gaussian location model and discrete distribution estimation for all levels of pri…
