No Arabic abstract
It is well known that an $n times n$ Wishart matrix with $d$ degrees of freedom is close to the appropriately centered and scaled Gaussian Orthogonal Ensemble (GOE) if $d$ is large enough. Recent work of Bubeck, Ding, Eldan, and Racz, and independently Jiang and Li, shows that the transition happens when $d = Theta ( n^{3} )$. Here we consider this critical window and explicitly compute the total variation distance between the Wishart and GOE matrices when $d / n^{3} to c in (0, infty)$. This shows, in particular, that the phase transition from Wishart to GOE is smooth.
We show that a large subclass of variograms is closed under products and that some desirable stability properties, such as the product of special compositions, can be obtained within the proposed setting. We introduce new classes of kernels of Schoenberg-L{e}vy type and demonstrate some important properties of rotationally invariant variograms.
The spectral gap $gamma$ of an ergodic and reversible Markov chain is an important parameter measuring the asymptotic rate of convergence. In applications, the transition matrix $P$ may be unknown, yet one sample of the chain up to a fixed time $t$ may be observed. Hsu, Kontorovich, and Szepesvari (2015) considered the problem of estimating $gamma$ from this data. Let $pi$ be the stationary distribution of $P$, and $pi_star = min_x pi(x)$. They showed that, if $t = tilde{O}bigl(frac{1}{gamma^3 pi_star}bigr)$, then $gamma$ can be estimated to within multiplicative constants with high probability. They also proved that $tilde{Omega}bigl(frac{n}{gamma}bigr)$ steps are required for precise estimation of $gamma$. We show that $tilde{O}bigl(frac{1}{gamma pi_star}bigr)$ steps of the chain suffice to estimate $gamma$ up to multiplicative constants with high probability. When $pi$ is uniform, this matches (up to logarithmic corrections) the lower bound of Hsu, Kontorovich, and Szepesvari.
We establish a central limit theorem for (a sequence of) multivariate martingales which dimension potentially grows with the length $n$ of the martingale. A consequence of the results are Gaussian couplings and a multiplier bootstrap for the maximum of a multivariate martingale whose dimensionality $d$ can be as large as $e^{n^c}$ for some $c>0$. We also develop new anti-concentration bounds for the maximum component of a high-dimensional Gaussian vector, which we believe is of independent interest. The results are applicable to a variety of settings. We fully develop its use to the estimation of context tree models (or variable length Markov chains) for discrete stationary time series. Specifically, we provide a bootstrap-based rule to tune several regularization parameters in a theoretically valid Lepski-type method. Such bootstrap-based approach accounts for the correlation structure and leads to potentially smaller penalty choices, which in turn improve the estimation of the transition probabilities.
We explore the applications of our previously established likelihood-ratio method for deriving concentration inequalities for a wide variety of univariate and multivariate distributions. New concentration inequalities for various distributions are developed without the idea of minimizing moment generating functions.
The coefficient function of the leading differential operator is estimated from observations of a linear stochastic partial differential equation (SPDE). The estimation is based on continuous time observations which are localised in space. For the asymptotic regime with fixed time horizon and with the spatial resolution of the observations tending to zero, we provide rate-optimal estimators and establish scaling limits of the deterministic PDE and of the SPDE on growing domains. The estimators are robust to lower order perturbations of the underlying differential operator and achieve the parametric rate even in the nonparametric setup with a spatially varying coefficient. A numerical example illustrates the main results.