No Arabic abstract
We are interested in estimating the location of what we call smooth change-point from $n$ independent observations of an inhomogeneous Poisson process. The smooth change-point is a transition of the intensity function of the process from one level to another which happens smoothly, but over such a small interval, that its length $delta_n$ is considered to be decreasing to $0$ as $nto+infty$. We show that if $delta_n$ goes to zero slower than $1/n$, our model is locally asymptotically normal (with a rather unusual rate $sqrt{delta_n/n}$), and the maximum likelihood and Bayesian estimators are consistent, asymptotically normal and asymptotically efficient. If, on the contrary, $delta_n$ goes to zero faster than $1/n$, our model is non-regular and behaves like a change-point model. More precisely, in this case we show that the Bayesian estimators are consistent, converge at rate $1/n$, have non-Gaussian limit distributions and are asymptotically efficient. All these results are obtained using the likelihood ratio analysis method of Ibragimov and Khasminskii, which equally yields the convergence of polynomial moments of the considered estimators. However, in order to study the maximum likelihood estimator in the case where $delta_n$ goes to zero faster than $1/n$, this method cannot be applied using the usual topologies of convergence in functional spaces. So, this study should go through the use of an alternative topology and will be considered in a future work.
Many popular robust estimators are $U$-quantiles, most notably the Hodges-Lehmann location estimator and the $Q_n$ scale estimator. We prove a functional central limit theorem for the sequential $U$-quantile process without any moment assumptions and under weak short-range dependence conditions. We further devise an estimator for the long-run variance and show its consistency, from which the convergence of the studentized version of the sequential $U$-quantile process to a standard Brownian motion follows. This result can be used to construct CUSUM-type change-point tests based on $U$-quantiles, which do not rely on bootstrapping procedures. We demonstrate this approach in detail at the example of the Hodges-Lehmann estimator for robustly detecting changes in the central location. A simulation study confirms the very good robustness and efficiency properties of the test. Two real-life data sets are analyzed.
In this paper, we deal with the problem of calibrating thresholding rules in the setting of Poisson intensity estimation. By using sharp concentration inequalities, oracle inequalities are derived and we establish the optimality of our estimate up to a logarithmic term. This result is proved under mild assumptions and we do not impose any condition on the support of the signal to be estimated. Our procedure is based on data-driven thresholds. As usual, they depend on a threshold parameter $gamma$ whose optimal value is hard to estimate from the data. Our main concern is to provide some theoretical and numerical results to handle this issue. In particular, we establish the existence of a minimal threshold parameter from the theoretical point of view: taking $gamma<1$ deteriorates oracle performances of our procedure. In the same spirit, we establish the existence of a maximal threshold parameter and our theoretical results point out the optimal range $gammain[1,12]$. Then, we lead a numerical study that shows that choosing $gamma$ larger than 1 but close to 1 is a fairly good choice. Finally, we compare our procedure with classical ones revealing the harmful role of the support of functions when estimated by classical procedures.
Let ${P_{theta}:theta in {mathbb R}^d}$ be a log-concave location family with $P_{theta}(dx)=e^{-V(x-theta)}dx,$ where $V:{mathbb R}^dmapsto {mathbb R}$ is a known convex function and let $X_1,dots, X_n$ be i.i.d. r.v. sampled from distribution $P_{theta}$ with an unknown location parameter $theta.$ The goal is to estimate the value $f(theta)$ of a smooth functional $f:{mathbb R}^dmapsto {mathbb R}$ based on observations $X_1,dots, X_n.$ In the case when $V$ is sufficiently smooth and $f$ is a functional from a ball in a Holder space $C^s,$ we develop estimators of $f(theta)$ with minimax optimal error rates measured by the $L_2({mathbb P}_{theta})$-distance as well as by more general Orlicz norm distances. Moreover, we show that if $dleq n^{alpha}$ and $s>frac{1}{1-alpha},$ then the resulting estimators are asymptotically efficient in Hajek-LeCam sense with the convergence rate $sqrt{n}.$ This generalizes earlier results on estimation of smooth functionals in Gaussian shift models. The estimators have the form $f_k(hat theta),$ where $hat theta$ is the maximum likelihood estimator and $f_k: {mathbb R}^dmapsto {mathbb R}$ (with $k$ depending on $s$) are functionals defined in terms of $f$ and designed to provide a higher order bias reduction in functional estimation problem. The method of bias reduction is based on iterative parametric bootstrap and it has been successfully used before in the case of Gaussian models.
This manuscript makes two contributions to the field of change-point detection. In a general change-point setting, we provide a generic algorithm for aggregating local homogeneity tests into an estimator of change-points in a time series. Interestingly, we establish that the error rates of the collection of test directly translate into detection properties of the change-point estimator. This generic scheme is then applied to the problem of possibly sparse multivariate mean change-point detection setting. When the noise is Gaussian, we derive minimax optimal rates that are adaptive to the unknown sparsity and to the distance between change-points. For sub-Gaussian noise, we introduce a variant that is optimal in almost all sparsity regimes.
The purpose of this paper is to estimate the intensity of a Poisson process $N$ by using thresholding rules. In this paper, the intensity, defined as the derivative of the mean measure of $N$ with respect to $ndx$ where $n$ is a fixed parameter, is assumed to be non-compactly supported. The estimator $tilde{f}_{n,gamma}$ based on random thresholds is proved to achieve the same performance as the oracle estimator up to a possible logarithmic term. Then, minimax properties of $tilde{f}_{n,gamma}$ on Besov spaces ${cal B}^{ensuremath alpha}_{p,q}$ are established. Under mild assumptions, we prove that $$sup_{fin B^{ensuremath alpha}_{p,q}cap ensuremath mathbb {L}_{infty}} ensuremath mathbb {E}(ensuremath | | tilde{f}_{n,gamma}-f| |_2^2)leq C(frac{log n}{n})^{frac{ensuremath alpha}{ensuremath alpha+{1/2}+({1/2}-frac{1}{p})_+}}$$ and the lower bound of the minimax risk for ${cal B}^{ensuremath alpha}_{p,q}cap ensuremath mathbb {L}_{infty}$ coincides with the previous upper bound up to the logarithmic term. This new result has two consequences. First, it establishes that the minimax rate of Besov spaces ${cal B}^{ensuremath alpha}_{p,q}$ with $pleq 2$ when non compactly supported functions are considered is the same as for compactly supported functions up to a logarithmic term. When $p>2$, the rate exponent, which depends on $p$, deteriorates when $p$ increases, which means that the support plays a harmful role in this case. Furthermore, $tilde{f}_{n,gamma}$ is adaptive minimax up to a logarithmic term.