No Arabic abstract
We consider a discrete-time Markov chain $boldsymbol{Phi}$ on a general state-space ${sf X}$, whose transition probabilities are parameterized by a real-valued vector $boldsymbol{theta}$. Under the assumption that $boldsymbol{Phi}$ is geometrically ergodic with corresponding stationary distribution $pi(boldsymbol{theta})$, we are interested in estimating the gradient $ abla alpha(boldsymbol{theta})$ of the steady-state expectation $$alpha(boldsymbol{theta}) = pi( boldsymbol{theta}) f.$$ To this end, we first give sufficient conditions for the differentiability of $alpha(boldsymbol{theta})$ and for the calculation of its gradient via a sequence of finite horizon expectations. We then propose two different likelihood ratio estimators and analyze their limiting behavior.
We propose a new approach for deriving probabilistic inequalities based on bounding likelihood ratios. We demonstrate that this approach is more general and powerful than the classical method frequently used for deriving concentration inequalities such as Chernoff bounds. We discover that the proposed approach is inherently related to statistical concepts such as monotone likelihood ratio, maximum likelihood, and the method of moments for parameter estimation. A connection between the proposed approach and the large deviation theory is also established. We show that, without using moment generating functions, tightest possible concentration inequalities may be readily derived by the proposed approach. We have derived new concentration inequalities using the proposed approach, which cannot be obtained by the classical approach based on moment generating functions.
We present a novel technique for estimating disk parameters (the centre and the radius) from its 2D image. It is based on the maximal likelihood approach utilising both edge pixels coordinates and the image intensity gradients. We emphasise the following advantages of our likelihood model. It has closed-form formulae for parameter estimating, requiring less computational resources than iterative algorithms therefore. The likelihood model naturally distinguishes the outer and inner annulus edges. The proposed technique was evaluated on both synthetic and real data.
Consider a setting with $N$ independent individuals, each with an unknown parameter, $p_i in [0, 1]$ drawn from some unknown distribution $P^star$. After observing the outcomes of $t$ independent Bernoulli trials, i.e., $X_i sim text{Binomial}(t, p_i)$ per individual, our objective is to accurately estimate $P^star$. This problem arises in numerous domains, including the social sciences, psychology, health-care, and biology, where the size of the population under study is usually large while the number of observations per individual is often limited. Our main result shows that, in the regime where $t ll N$, the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) is both statistically minimax optimal and efficiently computable. Precisely, for sufficiently large $N$, the MLE achieves the information theoretic optimal error bound of $mathcal{O}(frac{1}{t})$ for $t < clog{N}$, with regards to the earth movers distance (between the estimated and true distributions). More generally, in an exponentially large interval of $t$ beyond $c log{N}$, the MLE achieves the minimax error bound of $mathcal{O}(frac{1}{sqrt{tlog N}})$. In contrast, regardless of how large $N$ is, the naive plug-in estimator for this problem only achieves the sub-optimal error of $Theta(frac{1}{sqrt{t}})$.
The mixed fractional Vasicek model, which is an extended model of the traditional Vasicek model, has been widely used in modelling volatility, interest rate and exchange rate. Obviously, if some phenomenon are modeled by the mixed fractional Vasicek model, statistical inference for this process is of great interest. Based on continuous time observations, this paper considers the problem of estimating the drift parameters in the mixed fractional Vasicek model. We will propose the maximum likelihood estimators of the drift parameters in the mixed fractional Vasicek model with the Radon-Nikodym derivative for a mixed fractional Brownian motion. Using the fundamental martingale and the Laplace transform, both the strong consistency and the asymptotic normality of the maximum likelihood estimators have been established for all $Hin(0,1)$, $H eq 1/2$.
We analyze an interacting queueing network on $mathbb{Z}^d$ that was introduced in Sankararaman-Baccelli-Foss (2019) as a model for wireless networks. We show that the marginals of the minimal stationary distribution have exponential tails. This is used to furnish asymptotics for the maximum steady state queue length in growing boxes around the origin. We also establish a decay of correlations which shows that the minimal stationary distribution is strongly mixing, and hence, ergodic with respect to translations on $mathbb{Z}^d$.