We focus on the problem of manifold estimation: given a set of observations sampled close to some unknown submanifold $M$, one wants to recover information about the geometry of $M$. Minimax estimators which have been proposed so far all depend crucially on the a priori knowledge of some parameters quantifying the underlying distribution generating the sample (such as bounds on its density), whereas those quantities will be unknown in practice. Our contribution to the matter is twofold: first, we introduce a one-parameter family of manifold estimators $(\hat{M}_t)_{t\geq 0}$ based on a localized version of convex hulls, and show that for some choice of $t$, the corresponding estimator is minimax on the class of models of $C^2$ manifolds introduced in [Genovese et al., Manifold estimation and singular deconvolution under Hausdorff loss]. Second, we propose a completely data-driven selection procedure for the parameter $t$, leading to a minimax adaptive manifold estimator on this class of models. This selection procedure actually allows us to recover the Hausdorff distance between the set of observations and $M$, and can therefore be used as a scale parameter in other settings, such as tangent space estimation.
We construct an adaptive wavelet estimator that attains minimax near-optimal rates in a wide range of Besov balls. The convergence rates are affected only by the weakest dependence amongst the channels, and take into account both noise sources.
The paper deals with the non-parametric estimation in the regression with the multiplicative noise. Using the local polynomial fitting and the bayesian approach, we construct the minimax on isotropic Hölder class estimator. Next applying Lepski's method, we propose the estimator which is optimally adaptive over the collection of isotropic Hölder classes. To prove the optimality of the proposed procedure we establish, in particular, the exponential inequality for the deviation of locally bayesian estimator from the parameter to be estimated. These theoretical results are illustrated by simulati…
We address the problem of adaptive minimax density estimation on $\bR^d$ with $\bL_p$--loss on the anisotropic Nikol'skii classes. We fully characterize behavior of the minimax risk for different relationships between regularity parameters and norm indexes in definitions of the functional class and of the risk. In particular, we show that there are four different regimes with respect to the behavior of the minimax risk. We develop a single estimator which is (nearly) optimal in orderover the complete scale of the anisotropic Nikol'skii classes. Our estimation procedure is based on a data-drive…
In this paper, we introduce a new estimator for the emission densities of a nonparametric hidden Markov model. It is adaptive and minimax with respect to each state's regularity--as opposed to globally minimax estimators, which adapt to the worst regularity among the emission densities. Our method is based on Goldenshluger and Lepski's methodology. It is computationally efficient and only requires a family of preliminary estimators, without any restriction on the type of estimators considered. We present two such estimators that allow to reach minimax rates up to a logarithmic term: a spectral…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Sapienza University of Rome（罗马第一大学）
We find the minimax rate of convergence in Hausdorff distance for estimating a manifold M of dimension d embedded in R^D given a noisy sample from the manifold. We assume that the manifold satisfies a smoothness condition and that the noise distribution has compact support. We show that the optimal rate of convergence is n^{-2/(2+d)}. Thus, the minimax rate depends only on the dimension of the manifold, not on the dimension of the space in which M is embedded.
Motivated by applications in cybersecurity and epidemiology, we consider the problem of detecting an abrupt change in the intensity of a Poisson process, characterised by a jump (non transitory change) or a bump (transitory change) from constant. We propose a complete study from the nonasymptotic minimax testing point of view, when the constant baseline intensity is known or unknown. The question of minimax adaptation with respect to each parameter (height, location, length) of the change is tackled, leading to a comprehensive overview of the various minimax separation rate regimes. We exhibit…
We address the problem of adaptive minimax estimation in white gaussian noise model under $L_p$--loss, $1\leq p\leq\infty,$ on the anisotropic Nikolskii classes. We present the estimation procedure based on a new data-driven selection scheme from the family of kernel estimators with varying bandwidths. For proposed estimator we establish so-called Lp-norm oracle inequality and use it for deriving minimax adaptive results. We prove the existence of rate-adaptive estimators and fully characterize behavior of the minimax risk for different relationships between regularity parameters and norm inde…
Many algorithms in machine learning and computational geometry require, as input, the intrinsic dimension of the manifold that supports the probability distribution of the data. This parameter is rarely known and therefore has to be estimated. We characterize the statistical difficulty of this problem by deriving upper and lower bounds on the minimax rate for estimating the dimension. First, we consider the problem of testing the hypothesis that the support of the data-generating probability distribution is a well-behaved manifold of intrinsic dimension $d_1$ versus the alternative that it is …
Given observations from a circular random variable contaminated by an additive measurement error, we consider the problem of minimax optimal goodness-of-fit testing in a non-asymptotic framework. We propose direct and indirect testing procedures using a projection approach. The structure of the optimal tests depends on regularity and ill-posedness parameters of the model, which are unknown in practice. Therefore, adaptive testing strategies that perform optimally over a wide range of regularity and ill-posedness classes simultaneously are investigated. Considering a multiple testing procedure,…
We address the problem of density estimation with $\mathbb{L}_s$-loss by selection of kernel estimators. We develop a selection procedure and derive corresponding $\mathbb{L}_s$-risk oracle inequalities. It is shown that the proposed selection rule leads to the estimator being minimax adaptive over a scale of the anisotropic Nikol'skii classes. The main technical tools used in our derivations are uniform bounds on the $\mathbb{L}_s$-norms of empirical processes developed recently by Goldenshluger and Lepski [Ann. Probab. (2011), to appear].
In many statistical problems, stochastic signals can be represented as a sequence of noisy wavelet coefficients. In this paper, we develop general empirical Bayes methods for the estimation of true signal. Our estimators approximate certain oracle separable rules and achieve adaptation to ideal risks and exact minimax risks in broad collections of classes of signals. In particular, our estimators are uniformly adaptive to the minimum risk of separable estimators and the exact minimax risks simultaneously in Besov balls of all smoothness and shape indices, and they are uniformly superefficient …
We consider the detection problem of a two-dimensional function from noisy observations of its integrals over lines. We study both rate and sharp asymptotics for the error probabilities in the minimax setup. By construction, the derived tests are non-adaptive. We also construct a minimax rate-optimal adaptive test of rather simple structure.
High-dimensional linear regression with interaction effects is broadly applied in research fields such as bioinformatics and social science. In this paper, we first investigate the minimax rate of convergence for regression estimation in high-dimensional sparse linear models with two-way interactions. We derive matching upper and lower bounds under three types of heredity conditions: strong heredity, weak heredity and no heredity. From the results: (i) A stronger heredity condition may or may not drastically improve the minimax rate of convergence. In fact, in some situations, the minimax rate…
We introduce two novel procedures to test the nullity of the slope function in the functional linear model with real output. The test statistics combine multiple testing ideas and random projections of the input data through functional Principal Component Analysis. Interestingly, the procedures are completely data-driven and do not require any prior knowledge on the smoothness of the slope nor on the smoothness of the covariate functions. The levels and powers against local alternatives are assessed in a nonasymptotic setting. This allows us to prove that these procedures are minimax adaptive …
In quantum optics, the quantum state of a light beam is represented through the Wigner function, a density on $\mathbb R^2$ which may take negative values but must respect intrinsic positivity constraints imposed by quantum physics. In the framework of noisy quantum homodyne tomography with efficiency parameter $1/2 < η\leq 1$, we study the theoretical performance of a kernel estimator of the Wigner function. We prove that it is minimax efficient, up to a logarithmic factor in the sample size, for the $\mathbb L_\infty$-risk over a class of infinitely differentiable. We compute also the lower …
In the present paper, we consider the estimation of a periodic two-dimensional function $f(\cdot,\cdot)$ based on observations from its noisy convolution, and convolution kernel $g(\cdot,\cdot)$ unknown. We derive the minimax lower bounds for the mean squared error assuming that $f$ belongs to certain Besov space and the kernel function $g$ satisfies some smoothness properties. We construct an adaptive hard-thresholding wavelet estimator that is asymptotically near-optimal within a logarithmic factor in a wide range of Besov balls. The proposed estimation algorithm implements a truncation to e…
We consider stationary hidden Markov models with finite state space and nonparametric modeling of the emission distributions. It has remained unknown until very recently that such models are identifiable. In this paper, we propose a new penalized least-squares esti-mator for the emission distributions which is statistically optimal and practically tractable. We prove a non asymptotic oracle inequality for our nonparametric estimator of the emission distributions. A consequence is that this new estimator is rate minimax adaptive up to a logarithmic term. Our methodology is based on projections …
In the present paper, we derive lower bounds for the risk of the nonparametric empirical Bayes estimators. In order to attain the optimal convergence rate, we propose generalization of the linear empirical Bayes estimation method which takes advantage of the flexibility of the wavelet techniques. We present an empirical Bayes estimator as a wavelet series expansion and estimate coefficients by minimizing the prior risk of the estimator. As a result, estimation of wavelet coefficients requires solution of a well-posed low-dimensional sparse system of linear equations. The dimension of the syste…
In the inverse Gaussian sequence space model with additional noisy observations of the operator, we derive nonasymptotic minimax radii of testing for ellipsoid-type alternatives simultaneously for both the signal detection problem (testing against zero) and the goodness-of-fit testing problem (testing against a prescribed sequence) without any regularity assumption on the null hypothesis. The radii are the maximum of two terms, each of which only depends on one of the noise levels. Interestingly, the term involving the noise level of the operator explicitly depends on the null hypothesis and v…
k Nearest Neighbor (kNN) method is a simple and popular statistical method for classification and regression. For both classification and regression problems, existing works have shown that, if the distribution of the feature vector has bounded support and the probability density function is bounded away from zero in its support, the convergence rate of the standard kNN method, in which k is the same for all test samples, is minimax optimal. On the contrary, if the distribution has unbounded support, we show that there is a gap between the convergence rate achieved by the standard kNN method a…
We consider the problem of estimating the tail index $α$ of a distribution satisfying a $(α, β)$ second-order Pareto-type condition, where βis the second-order coefficient. When $β$ is available, it was previously proved that $α$ can be estimated with the oracle rate $n^{-β/(2β+1)}$. On the contrary, when $β$ is not available, estimating $α$ with the oracle rate is challenging; so additional assumptions that imply the estimability of $β$ are usually made. In this paper, we propose an adaptive estimator of $α$, and show that this estimator attains the rate $(n/\log\log n)^{-β/(2β+1)}$ without a…
Statistical inference from high-dimensional data with low-dimensional structures has recently attracted lots of attention. In machine learning, deep generative modeling approaches implicitly estimate distributions of complex objects by creating new samples from the underlying distribution, and have achieved great success in generating synthetic realistic-looking images and texts. A key step in these approaches is the extraction of latent features or representations (encoding) that can be used for accurately reconstructing the original data (decoding). In other words, low-dimensional manifold s…
Asymptotic efficiency is proved for the constructed in part 1 procedure, i.e. Pinsker's constant is found in the asymptotic lower bound for the minimax quadratic risk. It is shown that the asymptotic minimax quadratic risk of the constructed procedure coincides with this constant.
We study the adaptive minimax estimation of non-linear integral functionals of a density and extend the results obtained for linear and quadratic functionals to general functionals. The typical rate optimal non-adaptive minimax estimators of "smooth" non-linear functionals are higher order U-statistics. Since Lepski's method requires tight control of tails of such estimators, we bypass such calculations by a modification of Lepski's method which is applicable in such situations. As a necessary ingredient, we also provide a method to control higher order moments of minimax estimator of cubic in…
We consider the problem of optimality in manifold reconstruction. A random sample $\mathbb{X}_n = \left\{X_1,\ldots,X_n\right\}\subset \mathbb{R}^D$ composed of points close to a $d$-dimensional submanifold $M$, with or without outliers drawn in the ambient space, is observed. Based on the Tangential Delaunay Complex, we construct an estimator $\hat{M}$ that is ambient isotopic and Hausdorff-close to $M$ with high probability. The estimator $\hat{M}$ is built from existing algorithms. In a model with additive noise of small amplitude, we show that this estimator is asymptotically minimax optim…
This paper studies the minimax rate of nonparametric conditional density estimation under a weighted absolute value loss function in a multivariate setting. We first demonstrate that conditional density estimation is impossible if one only requires that $p_{X|Z}$ is smooth in $x$ for all values of $z$. This motivates us to consider a sub-class of absolutely continuous distributions, restricting the conditional density $p_{X|Z}(x|z)$ to not only be Hölder smooth in $x$, but also be total variation smooth in $z$. We propose a corresponding kernel-based estimator and prove that it achieves the mi…
In this paper, we study a new notion of scaled minimaxity for sparse estimation in high-dimensional linear regression model. We present more optimistic lower bounds than the one given by the classical minimax theory and hence improve on existing results. We recover sharp results for the global minimaxity as a consequence of our study. Fixing the scale of the signal-to-noise ratio, we prove that the estimation error can be much smaller than the global minimax error. We construct a new optimal estimator for the scaled minimax sparse estimation. An optimal adaptive procedure is also described.
This paper addresses the following simple question about sparsity. For the estimation of an $n$-dimensional mean vector $\boldsymbolθ$ in the Gaussian sequence model, is it possible to find an adaptive optimal threshold estimator in a full range of sparsity levels where nonadaptive optimality can be achieved by threshold estimators? We provide an explicit affirmative answer as follows. Under the squared loss, adaptive minimaxity in strong and weak $\ell_p$ balls with $0\le p<2$ is achieved by a class of smooth threshold estimators with the threshold level of the Benjamini-Hochberg FDR rule or …
Precision matrix is of significant importance in a wide range of applications in multivariate analysis. This paper considers adaptive minimax estimation of sparse precision matrices in the high dimensional setting. Optimal rates of convergence are established for a range of matrix norm losses. A fully data driven estimator based on adaptive constrained $\ell_1$ minimization is proposed and its rate of convergence is obtained over a collection of parameter spaces. The estimator, called ACLIME, is easy to implement and performs well numerically. A major step in establishing the minimax rate of c…
We derive non-asymptotic minimax bounds for the Hausdorff estimation of $d$-dimensional submanifolds $M \subset \mathbb{R}^D$ with (possibly) non-empty boundary $\partial M$. The model reunites and extends the most prevalent $\mathcal{C}^2$-type set estimation models: manifolds without boundary, and full-dimensional domains. We consider both the estimation of the manifold $M$ itself and that of its boundary $\partial M$ if non-empty. Given $n$ samples, the minimax rates are of order $O\bigl((\log n/n)^{2/d}\bigr)$ if $\partial M = \emptyset$ and $O\bigl((\log n/n)^{2/(d+1)}\bigr)$ if $\partial…
We estimate the quantum state of a light beam from results of quantum homodyne measurements performed on identically prepared quantum systems. The state is represented through the Wigner function, a generalized probability density on $\mathbb{R}^2$ which may take negative values and must respect intrinsic positivity constraints imposed by quantum physics. The effect of the losses due to detection inefficiencies, which are always present in a real experiment, is the addition to the tomographic data of independent Gaussian noise. We construct a kernel estimator for the Wigner function, prove tha…
We consider the estimation of a density at a fixed point under a local differential privacy constraint, where the observations are anonymised before being available for statistical inference. We propose both a privatised version of a projection density estimator as well as a kernel density estimator and derive their minimax rates under a privacy constraint. There is a twofold deterioration of the minimax rates due to the anonymisation, which we show to be unavoidable by providing lower bounds. In both estimation procedures a tuning parameter has to be chosen. We suggest a variant of the classi…
Given a dictionary of $M_n$ initial estimates of the unknown true regression function, we aim to construct linearly aggregated estimators that target the best performance among all the linear combinations under a sparse $q$-norm ($0 \leq q \leq 1$) constraint on the linear coefficients. Besides identifying the optimal rates of aggregation for these $\ell_q$-aggregation problems, our multi-directional (or universal) aggregation strategies by model mixing or model selection achieve the optimal rates simultaneously over the full range of $0\leq q \leq 1$ for general $M_n$ and upper bound $t_n$ of…
We estimate convex polytopes and general convex sets in $\mathbb R^d,d\geq 2$ in the regression framework. We measure the risk of our estimators using a $L^1$-type loss function and prove upper bounds on these risks. We show that, in the case of polytopes, these estimators achieve the minimax rate. For polytopes, this minimax rate is $\frac{\ln n}{n}$, which differs from the parametric rate for non-regular families by a logarithmic factor, and we show that this extra factor is essential. Using polytopal approximations we extend our results to general convex sets, and we achieve the minimax rat…
Human learners have the natural ability to use knowledge gained in one setting for learning in a different but related setting. This ability to transfer knowledge from one task to another is essential for effective learning. In this paper, we study transfer learning in the context of nonparametric classification based on observations from different distributions under the posterior drift model, which is a general framework and arises in many practical problems. We first establish the minimax rate of convergence and construct a rate-optimal two-sample weighted $K$-NN classifier. The results cha…
Learning Sparse Support under Differential Privacy: Adaptive Algorithms and Minimax Limits
Center for Data Science, Zhejiang University（浙江大学数据科学中心）；Department of Statistics and Data Science, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学沃顿商学院统计与数据科学系）
We observe $n$ independent $p-$dimensional Gaussian vectors with missing coordinates, that is each value (which is assumed standardized) is observed with probability $a>0$. We investigate the problem of minimax nonparametric testing that the high-dimensional covariance matrix $Σ$ of the underlying Gaussian distribution is the identity matrix, using these partially observed vectors. Here, $n$ and $p$ tend to infinity and $a>0$ tends to 0, asymptotically. We assume that $Σ$ belongs to a Sobolev-type ellipsoid with parameter $α>0$. When $α$ is known, we give asymptotically minimax consistent test…
We consider the nonparametric estimation problem of time-dependent multivariate functions observed in a presence of additive cylindrical Gaussian white noise of a small intensity. We derive minimax lower bounds for the $L^2$-risk in the proposed spatio-temporal model as the intensity goes to zero, when the underlying unknown response function is assumed to belong to a ball of appropriately constructed inhomogeneous time-dependent multivariate functions, motivated by practical applications. Furthermore, we propose both non-adaptive linear and adaptive non-linear wavelet estimators that are asym…
We consider a model $Y\_t=σ\_tη\_t$ in which $(σ\_t)$ is not independent of the noise process $(η\_t)$, but $σ\_t$ is independent of $η\_t$ for each $t$. We assume that $(σ\_t)$ is stationary and we propose an adaptive estimator of the density of $\ln(σ^2\_t)$ based on the observations $Y\_t$. Under various dependence structures, the rates of this nonparametric estimator coincide with the minimax rates obtained in the i.i.d. case when $(σ\_t)$ and $(η\_t)$ are independent, in all cases where these minimax rates are known. The results apply to various linear and non linear ARCH processes.
We investigate minimax results for the anisotropic functional deconvolution model when observations are affected by the presence of long-memory. Under specific conditions about the covariance matrices of the errors, we follow a standard procedure to construct an adaptive wavelet-based estimator that attains asymptotically near-optimal convergence rates. These rates depend on the parameter associated with the weakest long-range dependence, and deteriorate as the intensity of long-memory increases. This behavior suggests that the estimator adjusts to the best case scenario and that the weakest L…
