This paper is concerned with a semiparametric partially linear regression model with unknown regression coefficients, an unknown nonparametric function for the non-linear component, and unobservable Gaussian distributed random errors. We present a wavelet thresholding based estimation procedure to estimate the components of the partial linear model by establishing a connection between an $l_1$-penalty based wavelet estimator of the nonparametric component and Huber's M-estimation of a standard linear model with outliers. Some general results on the large sample properties of the estimates of both the parametric and the nonparametric part of the model are established. Simulations and a real example are used to illustrate the general results and to compare the proposed methodology with other methods available in the recent literature.
This paper considers the nonparametric regression model with negatively super-additive dependent (NSD) noise and investigates the convergence rates of thresholding estimators. It is shown that the term-by-term thresholding estimator achieves nearly optimal and the block thresholding estimator attains optimal (or nearly optimal) convergence rates over Besov spaces. Additionally, some numerical simulations are implemented to substantiate the validity and adaptivity of the thresholding estimators with the presence of NSD noise.
For signals belonging to balls in smoothness classes and noise with enough moments, the asymptotic behavior of the minimax quadratic risk among soft-threshold estimates is investigated. In turn, these results, combined with a median filtering method, lead to asymptotics for denoising heavy tails via wavelet thresholding. Some further comparisons of wavelet thresholding and of kernel estimators are also briefly discussed.
We investigate the posterior rate of convergence for wavelet shrinkage using a Bayesian approach in general Besov spaces. Instead of studying the Bayesian estimator related to a particular loss function, we focus on the posterior distribution itself from a nonparametric Bayesian asymptotics point of view and study its rate of convergence. We obtain the same rate as in \citet{abramovich04} where the authors studied the convergence of several Bayesian estimators.
We consider the regression model with (known) random design. We investigate the minimax performances of an adaptive wavelet block thresholding estimator under the $\mathbb{L}^p$ risk with $p\ge 2$ over Besov balls. We prove that it is near optimal and that it achieves better rates of convergence than the conventional term-by-term estimators (hard, soft,...).
A data-driven block thresholding procedure for wavelet regression is proposed and its theoretical and numerical properties are investigated. The procedure empirically chooses the block size and threshold level at each resolution level by minimizing Stein's unbiased risk estimate. The estimator is sharp adaptive over a class of Besov bodies and achieves simultaneously within a small constant factor of the minimax risk over a wide collection of Besov Bodies including both the ``dense'' and ``sparse'' cases. The procedure is easy to implement. Numerical results show that it has superior finite sa…
In this paper, we study the problem of adaptive estimation of the spectral density of a stationary Gaussian process. For this purpose, we consider a wavelet-based method which combines the ideas of wavelet approximation and estimation by information projection in order to warrants that the solution is a nonnegative function. The spectral density of the process is estimated by projecting the wavelet thresholding expansion of the periodogram onto a family of exponential functions. This ensures that the spectral density estimator is a strictly positive function. Then, by Bochner's theorem, the co…
The benefits of the wavelet approach for density estimation are well established in the literature, especially when the density to estimate is irregular or heterogeneous in smoothness. However, wavelet density estimates are typically not bona fide densities. In Aya-Moreno et al (2018), a `shape-preserving' wavelet density estimator was introduced, including as main step the estimation of the square-root of the density. A natural concept involving square-root of densities is the Hellinger distance - or equivalently, the Bhattacharyya affinity coefficient. In this paper, we deliver a fully data-…
We take a wavelet based approach to the analysis of point processes and the estimation of the first order intensity under a continuous time setting. A multiresolution analysis of a point process is formulated which motivates the definition of homogeneity at different scales of resolution, termed $J$-th level homogeneity. Further to this, the activity in a point processes' first order behavior at different scales of resolution is also defined and termed $L$-th level innovation. Likelihood ratio tests for both these properties are proposed with asymptotic distributions provided, even when only a…
Many statistical practices involve choosing between a full model and reduced models where some coefficients are reduced to zero. Data were used to select a model with estimated coefficients. Is it possible to do so and still come up with an estimator always better than the traditional estimator based on the full model? The James-Stein estimator is such an estimator, having a property called minimaxity. However, the estimator considers only one reduced model, namely the origin. Hence it reduces no coefficient estimator to zero or every coefficient estimator to zero. In many applications includi…
We observe $n$ heteroscedastic stochastic processes $\{Y_v(t)\}_{v}$, where for any $v\in\{1,\ldots,n\}$ and $t \in [0,1]$, $Y_v(t)$ is the convolution product of an unknown function $f$ and a known blurring function $g_v$ corrupted by Gaussian noise. Under an ordinary smoothness assumption on $g_1,\ldots,g_n$, our goal is to estimate the $d$-th derivatives (in weak sense) of $f$ from the observations. We propose an adaptive estimator based on wavelet block thresholding, namely the "BlockJS estimator". Taking the mean integrated squared error (MISE), our main theoretical result investigates th…
Let $\{(X_i,Y_i)\}_{i\in \{1,..., n\}}$ be an i.i.d. sample from the random design regression model $Y=f(X)+ε$ with $(X,Y)\in [0,1]\times [-M,M]$. In dealing with such a model, adaptation is naturally to be intended in terms of $L^2([0,1],G_X)$ norm where $G_X(\cdot)$ denotes the (known) marginal distribution of the design variable $X$. Recently much work has been devoted to the construction of estimators that adapts in this setting (see, for example, [5,24,25,32]), but only a few of them come along with a easy--to--implement computational scheme. Here we propose a family of estimators based o…
We consider the problem of estimating the unknown response function in the Gaussian white noise model. We first utilize the recently developed Bayesian maximum a posteriori "testimation" procedure of Abramovich et al. (2007) for recovering an unknown high-dimensional Gaussian mean vector. The existing results for its upper error bounds over various sparse $l_p$-balls are extended to more general cases. We show that, for a properly chosen prior on the number of non-zero entries of the mean vector, the corresponding adaptive estimator is simultaneously asymptotically minimax in a wide range of s…
This paper deals with the study of dependencies between two given events modeled by point processes. In particular, we focus on the context of DNA to detect favored or avoided distances between two given motifs along a genome suggesting possible interactions at a molecular level. For this, we naturally introduce a so-called reproduction function h that allows to quantify the favored positions of the motifs and which is considered as the intensity of a Poisson process. Our first interest is the estimation of this function h assumed to be well localized. The estimator based on random thresholds …
This paper deals with the problem of function estimation. Using the white noise model setting, we provide a method to construct a new wavelet procedure based on thresholding rules which takes advantage of the dyadic structure of the wavelet decomposition. We prove that this new procedure performs very well since, on the one hand, it is adaptive and near-minimax over a large class of Besov spaces and, on the other hand, the maximal functional space (maxiset) where this procedure attains a given rate of convergence is very large. More than this, by studying the shape of its maxiset, we prove tha…
This work is concerned with the study of the adaptivity properties of nonparametric regression estimators over the $d$-dimensional sphere within the global thresholding framework. The estimators are constructed by means of a form of spherical wavelets, the so-called needlets, which enjoy strong concentration properties in both harmonic and real domains. The author establishes the convergence rates of the $L^p$-risks of these estimators, focussing on their minimax properties and proving their optimality over a scale of nonparametric regularity function spaces, namely, the Besov spaces.
This paper deals with the problem of the multivariate copula density estimation. Using wavelet methods we provide two shrinkage procedures based on thresholding rules for which the knowledge of the regularity of the copula density to be estimated is not necessary. These methods, said to be adaptive, are proved to perform very well when adopting the minimax and the maxiset approaches. Moreover we show that these procedures can be discriminated in the maxiset sense. We produce an estimation algorithm whose qualities are evaluated thanks some simulation. Last, we propose a real life application f…
In this paper we deal with the regression problem in a random design setting. We investigate asymptotic optimality under minimax point of view of various Bayesian rules based on warped wavelets and show that they nearly attain optimal minimax rates of convergence over the Besov smoothness class considered. Warped wavelets have been introduced recently, they offer very good computable and easy-to-implement properties while being well adapted to the statistical problem at hand. We particularly put emphasis on Bayesian rules leaning on small and large variance Gaussian priors and discuss their si…
We construct nonparametric confidence sets for regression functions using wavelets that are uniform over Besov balls. We consider both thresholding and modulation estimators for the wavelet coefficients. The confidence set is obtained by showing that a pivot process, constructed from the loss function, converges uniformly to a mean zero Gaussian process. Inverting this pivot yields a confidence set for the wavelet coefficients, and from this we obtain confidence sets on functionals of the regression curve.
This work is concerned with the study of asymptotic properties of nonparametric density estimates in the framework of circular data. The estimation procedure here applied is based on wavelet thresholding methods: the wavelets used are the so-called Mexican needlets, which describe a nearly-tight frame on the circle. We study the asymptotic behaviour of the $L^{2}$-risk function for these estimates, in particular its adaptivity, proving that its rate of convergence is nearly optimal.
We consider a wavelet thresholding approach to adaptive variance function estimation in heteroscedastic nonparametric regression. A data-driven estimator is constructed by applying wavelet thresholding to the squared first-order differences of the observations. We show that the variance function estimator is nearly optimally adaptive to the smoothness of both the mean and variance functions. The estimator is shown to achieve the optimal adaptive rate of convergence under the pointwise squared error simultaneously over a range of smoothness classes. The estimator is also adaptively within a log…
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 propose a wavelet-based technique for the nonparametric estimation of functions contaminated with noise whose mean and variance are linked via a possibly unknown variance function. Our method, termed the data-driven wavelet-Fisz technique, consists of estimating the variance function via a Nadaraya-Watson estimator, and then performing a wavelet thresholding procedure which uses the estimated variance function and local means of the data to set the thresholds at a suitable level. We demonstrate the mean-square near-optimality of our wavelet estimator over the usual range of Besov classes. T…
Consider nonparametric function estimation under $L^p$-loss. The minimax rate for estimation of the regression function over a Hölder ball with smoothness index $β$ is $n^{-β/(2β+1)}$ if $1\leq p<\infty$ and $(n/\log n)^{-β/(2β+1)}$ if $p=\infty.$ There are many known procedures that either attain this rate for $p=\infty$ but are suboptimal by a $\log n$ factor in the case $p<\infty$ or the other way around. In this article, we construct an estimator that simultaneously achieves the optimal rates under $L^p$-risk for all $1\leq p\leq \infty$ without prior knowledge of $β.$ In contrast to class…
In this paper we investigate the problem of learning an unknown bounded function. We be emphasize special cases where it is possible to provide very simple (in terms of computation) estimates enjoying in addition the property of being universal : their construction does not depend on a priori knowledge on regularity conditions on the unknown object and still they have almost optimal properties for a whole bunch of functions spaces. These estimates are constructed using a thresholding schema, which has proven in the last decade in statistics to have very good properties for recovering signals w…
We consider nonparametric estimation of the transition operator $P$ of a Markov chain and its transition density $p$ where the singular values of $P$ are assumed to decay exponentially fast. This is for instance the case for periodised, reversible multi-dimensional diffusion processes observed in low frequency. We investigate the performance of a spectral hard thresholded Galerkin-type estimator for $P$ and ${p}$, discarding most of the estimated singular triplets. The construction is based on smooth basis functions such as wavelets or B-splines. We show its statistical optimality by establish…
The aim of this paper is to show the usefulness of Meyer wavelets for the classical problem of density estimation and for density deconvolution from noisy observations. By using such wavelets, the computation of the empirical wavelet coefficients relies on the fast Fourier transform of the data and on the fact that Meyer wavelets are band-limited functions. This makes such estimators very simple to compute and this avoids the problem of evaluating wavelets at non-dyadic points which is the main drawback of classical wavelet-based density estimators. Our approach is based on term-by-term thresh…
We study nonparametric estimation of the diffusion coefficient from discrete data, when the observations are blurred by additional noise. Such issues have been developed over the last 10 years in several application fields and in particular in high frequency financial data modelling, however mainly from a parametric and semiparametric point of view. This paper addresses the nonparametric estimation of the path of the (possibly stochastic) diffusion coefficient in a relatively general setting. By developing pre-averaging techniques combined with wavelet thresholding, we construct adaptive estim…
Most results in nonparametric regression theory are developed only for the case of additive noise. In such a setting many smoothing techniques including wavelet thresholding methods have been developed and shown to be highly adaptive. In this paper we consider nonparametric regression in exponential families with the main focus on the natural exponential families with a quadratic variance function, which include, for example, Poisson regression, binomial regression and gamma regression. We propose a unified approach of using a mean-matching variance stabilizing transformation to turn the relat…
Covariance function estimation is a fundamental task in multivariate functional data analysis and arises in many applications. In this paper, we consider estimating sparse covariance functions for high-dimensional functional data, where the number of random functions p is comparable to, or even larger than the sample size n. Aided by the Hilbert--Schmidt norm of functions, we introduce a new class of functional thresholding operators that combine functional versions of thresholding and shrinkage, and propose the adaptive functional thresholding estimator by incorporating the variance effects o…
In this paper we develop a nonparametric regression method that is simultaneously adaptive over a wide range of function classes for the regression function and robust over a large collection of error distributions, including those that are heavy-tailed, and may not even possess variances or means. Our approach is to first use local medians to turn the problem of nonparametric regression with unknown noise distribution into a standard Gaussian regression problem and then apply a wavelet block thresholding procedure to construct an estimator of the regression function. It is shown that the esti…
A theory of superefficiency and adaptation is developed under flexible performance measures which give a multiresolution view of risk and bridge the gap between pointwise and global estimation. This theory provides a useful benchmark for the evaluation of spatially adaptive estimators and shows that the possible degree of superefficiency for minimax rate optimal estimators critically depends on the size of the neighborhood over which the risk is measured. Wavelet procedures are given which adapt rate optimally for given shrinking neighborhoods including the extreme cases of mean squared error …
We describe here a framework for a certain class of multiscale likelihood factorizations wherein, in analogy to a wavelet decomposition of an L^2 function, a given likelihood function has an alternative representation as a product of conditional densities reflecting information in both the data and the parameter vector localized in position and scale. The framework is developed as a set of sufficient conditions for the existence of such factorizations, formulated in analogy to those underlying a standard multiresolution analysis for wavelets, and hence can be viewed as a multiresolution analys…
We study two nonlinear methods for statistical linear inverse problems when the operator is not known. The two constructions combine Galerkin regularization and wavelet thresholding. Their performances depend on the underlying structure of the operator, quantified by an index of sparsity. We prove their rate-optimality and adaptivity properties over Besov classes.
We address the problem of non-parametric density estimation under the additional constraint that only privatised data are allowed to be published and available for inference. For this purpose, we adopt a recent generalisation of classical minimax theory to the framework of local $α$-differential privacy and provide a lower bound on the rate of convergence over Besov spaces $B^s_{pq}$ under mean integrated $\mathbb L^r$-risk. This lower bound is deteriorated compared to the standard setup without privacy, and reveals a twofold elbow effect. In order to fulfil the privacy requirement, we suggest…
The construction of adaptive nonparametric procedures by means of wavelet thresholding techniques is now a classical topic in modern mathematical statistics. In this paper, we extend this framework to the analysis of nonparametric regression on sections of spin fiber bundles defined on the sphere. This can be viewed as a regression problem where the function to be estimated takes as its values algebraic curves (for instance, ellipses) rather than scalars, as usual. The problem is motivated by many important astrophysical applications, concerning for instance the analysis of the weak gravitatio…
