No Arabic abstract
In this paper, we study the geometry induced by the Fisher-Rao metric on the parameter space of Dirichlet distributions. We show that this space is geodesically complete and has everywhere negative sectional curvature. An important consequence of this negative curvature for applications is that the Fr{e}chet mean of a set of Dirichlet distributions is uniquely defined in this geometry.
This paper studies the Fisher-Rao geometry on the parameter space of beta distributions. We derive the geodesic equations and the sectional curvature, and prove that it is negative. This leads to uniqueness for the Riemannian centroid in that space. We use this Riemannian structure to study canonical moments, an intrinsic representation of the moments of a probability distribution. Drawing on the fact that a uniform distribution in the regular moment space corresponds to a product of beta distributions in the canonical moment space, we propose a mapping from the space of canonical moments to the product beta manifold, allowing us to use the Fisher-Rao geometry of beta distributions to compare and analyze canonical moments.
It is known that on a closed manifold of dimension greater than one, every smooth weak Riemannian metric on the space of smooth positive densities that is invariant under the action of the diffeomorphism group, is of the form $$ G_mu(alpha,beta)=C_1(mu(M)) int_M frac{alpha}{mu}frac{beta}{mu},mu + C_2(mu(M)) int_Malpha cdot int_Mbeta $$ for some smooth functions $C_1,C_2$ of the total volume $mu(M)$. Here we determine the geodesics and the curvature of this metric and study geodesic and metric completeness.
This paper is a short summary of our recent work on the medians and means of probability measures in Riemannian manifolds. Firstly, the existence and uniqueness results of local medians are given. In order to compute medians in practical cases, we propose a subgradient algorithm and prove its convergence. After that, Frechet medians are considered. We prove their statistical consistency and give some quantitative estimations of their robustness with the aid of upper curvature bounds. We also show that, in compact Riemannian manifolds, the Frechet medians of generic data points are always unique. Stochastic and deterministic algorithms are proposed for computing Riemannian p-means. The rate of convergence and error estimates of these algorithms are also obtained. Finally, we apply the medians and the Riemannian geometry of Toeplitz covariance matrices to radar target detection.
On a closed manifold of dimension greater than one, every smooth weak Riemannian metric on the space of smooth positive probability densities, that is invariant under the action of the diffeomorphism group, is a multiple of the Fisher--Rao metric.
Rao-Blackwellization is a notion often occurring in the MCMC literature, with possibly different meanings and connections with the original Rao--Blackwell theorem (Rao, 1945 and Blackwell,1947), including a reduction of the variance of the resulting Monte Carlo approximations. This survey reviews some of the meanings of the term.