Consider the following estimation problem: there are @math entities, each with an unknown parameter @math , and we observe @math independent random variables, @math , with @math Binomial @math . How accurately can one recover the "histogram" (i.e. cumulative density function) of the @math 's? While the empirical estimates would recover the histogram to earth mover distance @math (equivalently, @math distance between the CDFs), we show that, provided @math is sufficiently large, we can achieve error @math which is information theoretically optimal. We also extend our results to the multi-dimensional parameter case, capturing settings where each member of the population has multiple associated parameters. Beyond the theoretical results, we demonstrate that the recovery algorithm performs well in practice on a variety of datasets, providing illuminating insights into several domains, including politics, sports analytics, and variation in the gender ratio of offspring.
The seminal paper of Charles Stein @cite_5 was one of the earliest papers to identify the surprising possibility of leveraging the availability of independent data reflecting a large number of parameters of interest, to partially compensate for having little information about each parameter. The specific setting examined considered the problem of estimating a list of unknown means, @math given access to @math independent Gaussian random variables, @math , with @math . Stein showed that, perhaps surprisingly, that there is an estimator for the list of parameters @math that has smaller expected squared error than the naive unbiased empirical estimates of @math . This improved estimator shrinks'' the empirical estimates towards the average of the @math 's. In our setting, the process of recovering the set histogram of unknown @math 's and then leveraging this recovered set as a prior to correct the empirical estimates of each @math can be viewed as an analog of Stein's shrinkage'', and will have the property that the empirical estimates are shifted (in a non-linear fashion) towards the average of the @math 's.
@cite_5
1605194072 2952837844 2950541101 2404992943
Consider the recovery of an unknown signal @math from quantized linear measurements. In the one-bit compressive sensing setting, one typically assumes that @math is sparse, and that the measurements are of the form @math . Since such measurements give no information on the norm of @math , recovery methods typically assume that @math . We show that if one allows more generally for quantized affine measurements of the form @math , and if the vectors @math are random, an appropriate choice of the affine shifts @math allows norm recovery to be easily incorporated into existing methods for one-bit compressive sensing. In addition, we show that for arbitrary fixed @math in the annulus @math , one may estimate the norm @math up to additive error @math from @math such binary measurements through a single evaluation of the inverse Gaussian error function. Finally, all of our recovery guarantees can be made universal over sparse vectors in the sense that with high probability, one set of measurements and thresholds can successfully estimate all sparse vectors @math in a Euclidean ball of known radius. Consider the recovery of an unknown signal @math from quantized linear measurements. In the one-bit compressive sensing setting, one typically assumes that @math is sparse, and that the measurements are of the form @math . Since such measurements give no information on the norm of @math , recovery methods from such measurements typically assume that @math . We show that if one allows more generally for quantized affine measurements of the form @math , and if the vectors @math are random, an appropriate choice of the affine shifts @math allows norm recovery to be easily incorporated into existing methods for one-bit compressive sensing. Additionally, we show that for arbitrary fixed @math in the annulus @math , one may estimate the norm @math up to additive error @math from @math such binary measurements through a single evaluation of the inverse Gaussian error function. Finally, all of our recovery guarantees can be made universal over sparse vectors, in the sense that with high probability, one set of measurements and thresholds can successfully estimate all sparse vectors @math within a Euclidean ball of known radius. A great deal of effort has been devoted to reducing the risk of spurious scientific discoveries, from the use of sophisticated validation techniques, to deep statistical methods for controlling the false discovery rate in multiple hypothesis testing. However, there is a fundamental disconnect between the theoretical results and the practice of data analysis: the theory of statistical inference assumes a fixed collection of hypotheses to be tested, or learning algorithms to be applied, selected non-adaptively before the data are gathered, whereas in practice data is shared and reused with hypotheses and new analyses being generated on the basis of data exploration and the outcomes of previous analyses. In this work we initiate a principled study of how to guarantee the validity of statistical inference in adaptive data analysis. As an instance of this problem, we propose and investigate the question of estimating the expectations of @math adaptively chosen functions on an unknown distribution given @math random samples. We show that, surprisingly, there is a way to estimate an exponential in @math number of expectations accurately even if the functions are chosen adaptively. This gives an exponential improvement over standard empirical estimators that are limited to a linear number of estimates. Our result follows from a general technique that counter-intuitively involves actively perturbing and coordinating the estimates, using techniques developed for privacy preservation. We give additional applications of this technique to our question. We consider the problem of estimating a low-rank signal matrix from noisy measurements under the assumption that the distribution of the data matrix belongs to an exponential family. In this setting, we derive generalized Stein's unbiased risk estimation (SURE) formulas that hold for any spectral estimators which shrink or threshold the singular values of the data matrix. This leads to new data-driven spectral estimators, whose optimality is discussed using tools from random matrix theory and through numerical experiments. Under the spiked population model and in the asymptotic setting where the dimensions of the data matrix are let going to infinity, some theoretical properties of our approach are compared to recent results on asymptotically optimal shrinking rules for Gaussian noise. It also leads to new procedures for singular values shrinkage in finite-dimensional matrix denoising for Gamma-distributed and Poisson-distributed measurements.