This paper concerns estimating a probability density function $f$ based on iid observations from $g(x)=W^{-1} w(x) f(x)$, where the weight function $w$ and the total weight $W=\int w(x) f(x) dx$ may not be known. The length-biased and excess life distribution models are considered. The asymptotic normality and the rate of convergence in mean squared error (MSE) of the estimators are studied.
We propose a new wavelet-based method for density estimation when the data are size-biased. More specifically, we consider a power of the density of interest, where this power exceeds 1/2. Warped wavelet bases are employed, where warping is attained by some continuous cumulative distribution function. A special case is the conventional orthonormal wavelet estimation, where the warping distribution is the standard continuous uniform. We show that both linear and nonlinear wavelet estimators are consistent, with optimal and/or near-optimal rates. Monte Carlo simulations are performed to compare …
National Chiao Tung University（国立交通大学）；Texas A&M University（德克萨斯农工大学）
Modifying the reward-biased maximum likelihood method originally proposed in the adaptive control literature, we propose novel learning algorithms to handle the explore-exploit trade-off in linear bandits problems as well as generalized linear bandits problems. We develop novel index policies that we prove achieve order-optimality, and show that they achieve empirical performance competitive with the state-of-the-art benchmark methods in extensive experiments. The new policies achieve this with low computation time per pull for linear bandits, and thereby resulting in both favorable regret as …
New upper bounds are developed for the $L_2$ distance between $ξ/\text{Var}[ξ]^{1/2}$ and linear and quadratic functions of $z\sim N(0,I_n)$ for random variables of the form $ξ=bz^\top f(z) - \text{div} f(z)$. The linear approximation yields a central limit theorem when the squared norm of $f(z)$ dominates the squared Frobenius norm of $\nabla f(z)$ in expectation. Applications of this normal approximation are given for the asymptotic normality of de-biased estimators in linear regression with correlated design and convex penalty in the regime $p/n \le γ$ for constant $γ\in(0,{\infty})$. For t…
National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University（国立阳明交通大学）
Reward-biased maximum likelihood estimation (RBMLE) is a classic principle in the adaptive control literature for tackling explore-exploit trade-offs. This paper studies the stochastic contextual bandit problem with general bounded reward functions and proposes NeuralRBMLE, which adapts the RBMLE principle by adding a bias term to the log-likelihood to enforce exploration. NeuralRBMLE leverages the representation power of neural networks and directly encodes exploratory behavior in the parameter space, without constructing confidence intervals of the estimated rewards. We propose two variants …
Capture-recapture methods aim to estimate the size of a closed population on the basis of multiple incomplete enumerations of individuals. In many applications, the individual probability of being recorded is heterogeneous in the population. Previous studies have suggested that it is not possible to reliably estimate the total population size when capture heterogeneity exists. Here we approach population estimation in the presence of capture heterogeneity as a latent length biased nonparametric density estimation problem on the unit interval. We show that in this setting it is generally imposs…
The length-biased Birnbaum-Saunders distribution is both useful and practical for environmental sciences. In this paper, we initially derive some new properties for the length-biased Birnbaum-Saunders distribution, showing that one of its parameters is the mode and that it is bimodal. We then introduce a new regression model based on this distribution. We implement use the maximum likelihood method for parameter estimation, approach interval estimation and consider three types of residuals. An elaborate Monte Carlo study is carried out for evaluating the performance of the likelihood-based est…
De-biased Distribution Estimation for Locally Differential Private Survival Data
The State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo（纽约州立大学布法罗分校）；National Chengchi University（国立政治大学）；University of North Carolina at Charlotte（北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校）
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory（SLAC国家加速器实验室）；ULiège（列日大学）
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 use all noise-corrupted observations to estimate a prior or source distribution over uncorrupted samples, and then to perform single-observation posterior inference using the fitted source distribution. We propose an approach based on the direct maximization of the log-marginal likelihood of the observations, examining both biased and de-biased estimators, a…
Simultaneous inference for high-dimensional non-Gaussian time series is always considered to be a challenging problem. Such tasks require not only robust estimation of the coefficients in the random process, but also deriving limiting distribution for a sum of dependent variables. In this paper, we propose a multiplier bootstrap procedure to conduct simultaneous inference for the transition coefficients in high-dimensional non-Gaussian vector autoregressive (VAR) models. This bootstrap-assisted procedure allows the dimension of the time series to grow exponentially fast in the number of observ…
Information from various data sources is increasingly available nowadays. However, some of the data sources may produce biased estimation due to commonly encountered biased sampling, population heterogeneity, or model misspecification. This calls for statistical methods to combine information in the presence of biased sources. In this paper, a robust data fusion-extraction method is proposed. The method can produce a consistent estimator of the parameter of interest even if many of the data sources are biased. The proposed estimator is easy to compute and only employs summary statistics, and h…
Local moment matching: A unified methodology for symmetric functional estimation and distribution estimation under Wasserstein distance
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
我们提出\emph{Local Moment Matching (LMM)}，对称函数估计和分布估计下瓦瑟斯坦距离的统一方法。我们构造了一个有效的可计算的估计，实现了极大极小率估计的分布排列，并表明，插件的方法，我们的无标签分布估计是“通用”的对称泛函估计的离散分布。而不是做最好的多项式逼近显式在现有文献中的功能估计，插件的方法进行多项式逼近隐式，并达到最佳的样本复杂性的熵，功率和支持大小泛函。
Inference in pseudo-observation-based regression using (biased) covariance estimation and naive bootstrapping
Institute of Statistics, RWTH Aachen University（亚琛工业大学统计研究所）；Department of Public Health - Department of Biostatistics, Aarhus University（奥胡斯大学公共卫生学院-生物统计系）
We study the maximum score statistic to detect and estimate local signals in the form of change-points in the level, slope, or other property of a sequence of observations, and to segment the sequence when there appear to be multiple changes. We find that when observations are serially dependent, the change-points can lead to upwardly biased estimates of autocorrelations, resulting in a sometimes serious loss of power. Examples involving temperature variations, the level of atmospheric greenhouse gases, suicide rates, incidence of COVID-19, and excess deaths during the pandemic illustrate the …
We propose an online parametric estimation method of stochastic differential equations with discrete observations and misspecified modelling based on online gradient descent. Our study provides uniform upper bounds for the risks of the estimators over a family of stochastic differential equations. The derivation of the bounds involves three underlying theoretical results: the analysis of the stochastic mirror descent algorithm based on dependent and biased subgradients, the simultaneous exponential ergodicity of classes of diffusion processes, and the proposal of loss functions whose approxima…
