Efficient density estimation via piecewise polynomial approximation

DOI10.1145/2591796.2591848zbMATH Open1315.68163arXiv1305.3207OpenAlexW2143122862MaRDI QIDQ5259596FDOQ5259596

Rocco A. Servedio, Xiaorui Sun, Ilias Diakonikolas, Siu On Chan

Publication date: 26 June 2015

Published in: Proceedings of the forty-sixth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: We give a highly efficient "semi-agnostic" algorithm for learning univariate probability distributions that are well approximated by piecewise polynomial density functions. Let $p$ be an arbitrary distribution over an interval $I$ which is $au$-close (in total variation distance) to an unknown probability distribution $q$ that is defined by an unknown partition of $I$ into $t$ intervals and $t$ unknown degree-$d$ polynomials specifying $q$ over each of the intervals. We give an algorithm that draws $ildeO(tew(d+1)/ep{s}^2)$ samples from $p$, runs in time $poly(t,d,1/eps)$, and with high probability outputs a piecewise polynomial hypothesis distribution $h$ that is $(O(au)+eps)$-close (in total variation distance) to $p$. This sample complexity is essentially optimal; we show that even for $au=0$, any algorithm that learns an unknown $t$-piecewise degree-$d$ probability distribution over $I$ to accuracy $eps$ must use $Omega(fract(d+1)poly(1+log(d+1))cdotfrac1ep{s}^2)$ samples from the distribution, regardless of its running time. Our algorithm combines tools from approximation theory, uniform convergence, linear programming, and dynamic programming. We apply this general algorithm to obtain a wide range of results for many natural problems in density estimation over both continuous and discrete domains. These include state-of-the-art results for learning mixtures of log-concave distributions; mixtures of $t$-modal distributions; mixtures of Monotone Hazard Rate distributions; mixtures of Poisson Binomial Distributions; mixtures of Gaussians; and mixtures of $k$-monotone densities. Our general technique yields computationally efficient algorithms for all these problems, in many cases with provably optimal sample complexities (up to logarithmic factors) in all parameters.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1305.3207

zbMATH Keywords

unsupervised learningcomputational learning theorylearning distributions

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Learning and adaptive systems in artificial intelligence (68T05) Computational learning theory (68Q32)

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• Function approximation with polynomial membership functions and alternating cluster estimation
• Maximum a posteriori estimators as a limit of Bayes estimators
• Efficient and robust density estimation using Bernstein type polynomials
• Title not available (Why is that?)
• On the nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator for Gaussian location mixture densities with application to Gaussian denoising
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Uses Software

• SuLQ

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