In this paper we consider the problem of estimating the parameters of a Poisson arrival process where the rate function is assumed to lie in the span of a known basis. Our goal is to estimate the basis expansions coefficients given a realization of this process. We establish novel guarantees concerning the accuracy achieved by the maximum likelihood estimate. Our initial result is near optimal, with the exception of an undesirable dependence on the dynamic range of the rate function. We then show how to remove this dependence through a process of "noise regularization", which results in an improved bound. We conjecture that a similar guarantee should be possible when using a more direct (deterministic) regularization scheme. We conclude with a discussion of practical applications and an empirical examination of the proposed regularization schemes.
In @cite_23 , a variation of the LASSO estimator (similar to that used in @cite_4 ) is proposed that is suitable for solving the Poisson counting inference problem. Performance bounds for constrained penalized maximum-likelihood estimators are provided in @cite_7 @cite_11 @cite_17 . Of course, these bounds apply only to Poisson counting problems -- nevertheless, since our results also imply bounds for the counting model, it is instructive to compare our bounds with the existing work in this domain. Among the prior work which is most relevant is that of @cite_11 , from which we specifically draw inspiration in portions of our analysis. We provide a detailed comparison of our results with those in @cite_11 in .
@cite_11 @cite_4 @cite_7 @cite_23 @cite_17
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We are motivated by problems that arise in a number of applications such as Online Marketing and Explosives detection, where the observations are usually modeled using Poisson statistics. We model each observation as a Poisson random variable whose mean is a sparse linear superposition of known patterns. Unlike many conventional problems observations here are not identically distributed since they are associated with different sensing modalities. We analyze the performance of a maximum likelihood (ML) decoder, which for our Poisson setting involves a non-linear optimization but yet is computationally tractable. We derive fundamental sample complexity bounds for sparse recovery when the measurements are contaminated with Poisson noise. In contrast to the least-squares linear regression setting with Gaussian noise, we observe that in addition to sparsity, the scale of the parameters also fundamentally impacts @math error in the Poisson setting. We show that our upper bounds are tight under suitable regularity conditions. Specifically, we derive a minimax matching lower bound on the mean-squared error and show that our constrained ML decoder is minimax optimal for this regime. Due to its low computational cost, Lasso is an attractive regularization method for high-dimensional statistical settings. In this paper, we consider multivariate counting processes depending on an unknown function to be estimated by linear combinations of a fixed dictionary. To select coefficients, we propose an adaptive @math -penalization methodology, where data-driven weights of the penalty are derived from new Bernstein type inequalities for martingales. Oracle inequalities are established under assumptions on the Gram matrix of the dictionary. Non-asymptotic probabilistic results for multivariate Hawkes processes are proven, which allows us to check these assumptions by considering general dictionaries based on histograms, Fourier or wavelet bases. Motivated by problems of neuronal activities inference, we finally lead a simulation study for multivariate Hawkes processes and compare our methodology with the adaptive Lasso procedure proposed by Zou in Zou . We observe an excellent behavior of our procedure with respect to the problem of supports recovery. We rely on theoretical aspects for the essential question of tuning our methodology. Unlike adaptive Lasso of Zou , our tuning procedure is proven to be robust with respect to all the parameters of the problem, revealing its potential for concrete purposes, in particular in neuroscience. This paper describes performance bounds for compressed sensing (CS) where the underlying sparse or compressible (sparsely approximable) signal is a vector of nonnegative intensities whose measurements are corrupted by Poisson noise. In this setting, standard CS techniques cannot be applied directly for several reasons. First, the usual signal-independent and or bounded noise models do not apply to Poisson noise, which is nonadditive and signal-dependent. Second, the CS matrices typically considered are not feasible in real optical systems because they do not adhere to important constraints, such as nonnegativity and photon flux preservation. Third, the typical l2 - l1 minimization leads to overfitting in the high-intensity regions and oversmoothing in the low-intensity areas. In this paper, we describe how a feasible positivity- and flux-preserving sensing matrix can be constructed, and then analyze the performance of a CS reconstruction approach for Poisson data that minimizes an objective function consisting of a negative Poisson log likelihood term and a penalty term which measures signal sparsity. We show that, as the overall intensity of the underlying signal increases, an upper bound on the reconstruction error decays at an appropriate rate (depending on the compressibility of the signal), but that for a fixed signal intensity, the error bound actually grows with the number of measurements or sensors. This surprising fact is both proved theoretically and justified based on physical intuition. Sparse linear inverse problems appear in a variety of settings, but often the noise contaminating observations cannot accurately be described as bounded by or arising from a Gaussian distribution. Poisson observations in particular are a feature of several real-world applications. Previous work on sparse Poisson inverse problems encountered several limiting technical hurdles. This paper describes a novel alternative analysis approach for sparse Poisson inverse problems that (a) sidesteps the technical challenges in previous work, (b) admits estimators that can readily be computed using off-the-shelf LASSO algorithms, and (c) hints at a general framework for broad classes of noise in sparse linear inverse problems. At the heart of this new approach lies a weighted LASSO estimator for which data-dependent weights are based on Poisson concentration inequalities. Unlike previous analyses of the weighted LASSO, the proposed analysis depends on conditions which can be checked or shown to hold in general settings with high probability. Poisson processes are commonly used models for describing discrete arrival phenomena arising, for example, in photon-limited scenarios in low-light and infrared imaging, astronomy, and nuclear medicine applications. In this context, several recent efforts have evaluated Poisson denoising methods that utilize contemporary sparse modeling and dictionary learning techniques designed to exploit and leverage (local) shared structure in the images being estimated. This paper establishes a theoretical foundation for such procedures. Specifically, we formulate sparse and structured dictionary-based Poisson denoising methods as constrained maximum likelihood estimation strategies, and establish performance bounds for their mean-square estimation error using the framework of complexity penalized maximum likelihood analyses.