We study the performances of an adaptive procedure based on a convex combination, with data-driven weights, of term-by-term thresholded wavelet estimators. For the bounded regression model, with random uniform design, and the nonparametric density model, we show that the resulting estimator is optimal in the minimax sense over all Besov balls under the $L^2$ risk, without any logarithm factor.
Nonparametric density estimators are studied for $d$-dimensional, strongly spatial mixing data which is defined on a general $N$-dimensional lattice structure. We consider linear and nonlinear hard thresholded wavelet estimators which are derived from a $d$-dimensional multiresolution analysis. We give sufficient criteria for the consistency of these estimators and derive rates of convergence in $L^{p'}$ for $p'\in [1,\infty)$. For this reason, we study density functions which are elements of a $d$-dimensional Besov space $B^s_{p,q}(\mathbb{R}^d)$. We also verify the analytic correctness of ou…
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.
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 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…
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 …
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…
We construct an adaptive estimator of a density function on $d$ dimensional unit sphere $S^d$ ($d \geq 2 $), using a new type of spherical frames. The frames, or as we call them, stereografic wavelets are obtained by transforming a wavelet system, namely Daubechies, using some stereographic operators. We prove that our estimator achieves an optimal rate of convergence on some Besov type class of functions by adapting to unknown smoothness. Our new construction of stereografic wavelet system gives us a multiresolution approximation of $L^2(S^d)$ which can be used in many approximation and estim…
We propose a new statistical procedure able in some way to overcome the curse of dimensionality without structural assumptions on the function to estimate. It relies on a least-squares type penalized criterion and a new collection of models built from hyperbolic biorthogonal wavelet bases. We study its properties in a unifying intensity estimation framework, where an oracle-type inequality and adaptation to mixed smoothness are shown to hold. Besides, we describe an algorithm for implementing the estimator with a quite reasonable complexity.
We adress the problem of spherical deconvolution in a non parametric statistical framework, where both the signal and the operator kernel are subject to error measurements. After a preliminary treatment of the kernel, we apply a thresholding procedure to the signal in a second generation wavelet basis. Under standard assumptions on the kernel, we study the theoritical performance of the resulting algorithm in terms of $L^p$ losses ($p\geq 1$) on Besov spaces on the sphere. We hereby extend the application of second generation spherical wavelets to the blind deconvolution framework. The procedu…
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…
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…
Linear wavelet density estimators are wavelet projections of the empirical measure based on independent, identically distributed observations. We study here the law of the iterated logarithm (LIL) and a Berry-Esseen type theorem. These results are proved under different assumptions on the density $f$ that are different from those needed for similar results in the case of convolution kernels (KDE): whereas the smoothness requirements are much less stringent than for the KDE, Riemann integrability assumptions are needed in order to compute the asymptotic variance, which gives the scaling constan…
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 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…
Independent component analysis (ICA) is linked up with the problem of estimating a non linear functional of a density, for which optimal estimators are well known. The precision of ICA is analyzed from the viewpoint of functional spaces in the wavelet framework. In particular, it is shown that, under Besov smoothness conditions, parametric rate of convergence is achieved by a U-statistic estimator of the wavelet ICA contrast, while the previously introduced plug-in estimator $\hat C^2\_j$, with moderate computational cost, has a rate in $n^{-4s\over 4s+d}$.
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 consider the statistical deconvolution problem where one observes $n$ replications from the model $Y=X+ε$, where $X$ is the unobserved random signal of interest and $ε$ is an independent random error with distribution $ϕ$. Under weak assumptions on the decay of the Fourier transform of $ϕ,$ we derive upper bounds for the finite-sample sup-norm risk of wavelet deconvolution density estimators $f_n$ for the density $f$ of $X$, where $f:\mathbb{R}\to \mathbb{R}$ is assumed to be bounded. We then derive lower bounds for the minimax sup-norm risk over Besov balls in this estimation problem and s…
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…
In this paper we focus on nonparametric estimators in inverse problems for Poisson processes involving the use of wavelet decompositions. Adopting an adaptive wavelet Galerkin discretization, we find that our method combines the well-known theoretical advantages of wavelet--vaguelette decompositions for inverse problems in terms of optimally adapting to the unknown smoothness of the solution, together with the remarkably simple closed-form expressions of Galerkin inversion methods. Adapting the results of Barron and Sheu [Ann. Statist. 19 (1991) 1347--1369] to the context of log-intensity func…
We study a nonparametric regression model for sample data which is defined on an $N$-dimensional lattice structure and which is assumed to be strong spatial mixing: we use design adapted multidimensional Haar wavelets which form an orthonormal system w.r.t. the empirical measure of the sample data. For such orthonormal systems, we consider a nonparametric hard thresholding estimator. We give sufficient criteria for the consistency of this estimator and we derive rates of convergence. The theorems reveal that our estimator is able to adapt to the local smoothness of the underlying regression fu…
Given a random sample from some unknown density $f_0: \mathbb R \to [0, \infty)$ we devise Haar wavelet estimators for $f_0$ with variable resolution levels constructed from localised test procedures (as in Lepski, Mammen, and Spokoiny (1997, Ann. Statist.)). We show that these estimators adapt to spatially heterogeneous smoothness of $f_0$, simultaneously for every point $x$ in a fixed interval, in sup-norm loss. The thresholding constants involved in the test procedures can be chosen in practice under the idealised assumption that the true density is locally constant in a neighborhood of the…
Even though the statistical theory of linear inverse problems is a well-studied topic, certain relevant cases remain open. Among these is the estimation of functions of bounded variation ($BV$), meaning $L^1$ functions on a $d$-dimensional domain whose weak first derivatives are finite Radon measures. The estimation of $BV$ functions is relevant in many applications, since it involves minimal smoothness assumptions and gives simplified, interpretable cartoonized reconstructions. In this paper we propose a novel technique for estimating $BV$ functions in an inverse problem setting, and provide …
The objective of the present paper is to introduce the concept of a spatially inhomogeneous linear inverse problem where the degree of ill-posedness of operator $Q$ depends not only on the scale but also on location. In this case, the rates of convergence are determined by the interaction of four parameters, the smoothness and spatial homogeneity of the unknown function $f$ and degrees of ill-posedness and spatial inhomogeneity of operator $Q$. Estimators obtained in the paper are based either on wavelet-vaguelette decomposition (if the norms of all vaguelettes are finite) or on a hybrid of wa…
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 the problem of adaptive estimation of the functional component in a multivariate partial linear model where the argument of the function is defined on a $q$-dimensional grid. Obtaining an adaptive estimator of this functional component is an important practical problem in econometrics where exact distributions of random errors and the parametric component are mostly unknown and cannot safely assumed to be normal. An estimator of the functional component that is adaptive in the mean squared sense over the wide range of multivariate Besov classes and robust to a wide choice of distri…
