No Arabic abstract
The reach of a submanifold is a crucial regularity parameter for manifold learning and geometric inference from point clouds. This paper relates the reach of a submanifold to its convexity defect function. Using the stability properties of convexity defect functions, along with some new bounds and the recent submanifold estimator of Aamari and Levrard [Ann. Statist. 47 177-204 (2019)], an estimator for the reach is given. A uniform expected loss bound over a C^k model is found. Lower bounds for the minimax rate for estimating the reach over these models are also provided. The estimator almost achieves these rates in the C^3 and C^4 cases, with a gap given by a logarithmic factor.
Various problems in manifold estimation make use of a quantity called the reach, denoted by $tau_M$, which is a measure of the regularity of the manifold. This paper is the first investigation into the problem of how to estimate the reach. First, we study the geometry of the reach through an approximation perspective. We derive new geometric results on the reach for submanifolds without boundary. An estimator $hat{tau}$ of $tau_{M}$ is proposed in a framework where tangent spaces are known, and bounds assessing its efficiency are derived. In the case of i.i.d. random point cloud $mathbb{X}_{n}$, $hat{tau}(mathbb{X}_{n})$ is showed to achieve uniform expected loss bounds over a $mathcal{C}^3$-like model. Finally, we obtain upper and lower bounds on the minimax rate for estimating the reach.
We study the least squares estimator in the residual variance estimation context. We show that the mean squared differences of paired observations are asymptotically normally distributed. We further establish that, by regressing the mean squared differences of these paired observations on the squared distances between paired covariates via a simple least squares procedure, the resulting variance estimator is not only asymptotically normal and root-$n$ consistent, but also reaches the optimal bound in terms of estimation variance. We also demonstrate the advantage of the least squares estimator in comparison with existing methods in terms of the second order asymptotic properties.
In this paper, we give a new characterization of the cut locus of a point on a compact Riemannian manifold as the zero set of the optimal transport density solution of the Monge-Kantorovich equations, a PDE formulation of the optimal transport problem with cost equal to the geodesic distance. Combining this result with an optimal transport numerical solver based on the so-called dynamical Monge-Kantorovich approach, we propose a novel framework for the numerical approximation of the cut locus of a point in a manifold. We show the applicability of the proposed method on a few examples settled on 2d-surfaces embedded in $R^{3}$ and discuss advantages and limitations.
The approximation of both geodesic distances and shortest paths on point cloud sampled from an embedded submanifold $mathcal{M}$ of Euclidean space has been a long-standing challenge in computational geometry. Given a sampling resolution parameter $ h $, state-of-the-art discrete methods yield $ O(h) $ provable approximations. In this paper, we investigate the convergence of such approximations made by Manifold Moving Least-Squares (Manifold-MLS), a method that constructs an approximating manifold $mathcal{M}^h$ using information from a given point cloud that was developed by Sober & Levin in 2019. In this paper, we show that provided that $mathcal{M}in C^{k}$ and closed (i.e. $mathcal{M}$ is a compact manifold without boundary) the Riemannian metric of $ mathcal{M}^h $ approximates the Riemannian metric of $ mathcal{M}, $. Explicitly, given points $ p_1, p_2 in mathcal{M}$ with geodesic distance $ rho_{mathcal{M}}(p_1, p_2) $, we show that their corresponding points $ p_1^h, p_2^h in mathcal{M}^h$ have a geodesic distance of $ rho_{mathcal{M}^h}(p_1^h,p_2^h) = rho_{mathcal{M}}(p_1, p_2)(1 + O(h^{k-1})) $ (i.e., the Manifold-MLS is nearly an isometry). We then use this result, as well as the fact that $ mathcal{M}^h $ can be sampled with any desired resolution, to devise a naive algorithm that yields approximate geodesic distances with a rate of convergence $ O(h^{k-1}) $. We show the potential and the robustness to noise of the proposed method on some numerical simulations.
In this paper, we have developed a new class of sampling schemes for estimating parameters of binomial and Poisson distributions. Without any information of the unknown parameters, our sampling schemes rigorously guarantee prescribed levels of precision and confidence.