Over the past 20 years, kernel discrepancies have been leveraged as a highly powerful tool for quantifying the disagreement of distributions, with numerous successful applications in two-sample, goodness-of-fit, and independence testing, among others. Their fastest estimators are known to converge at a parametric rate---$n^{-1/2}$---under mild conditions. While this rate is known to be minimax optimal on $\mathbb R^d$ under strict assumptions with bounded kernels, little is known about its optimality beyond the finite-dimensional Euclidean setting with unbounded kernels. In this work, we prove that the minimax lower bound of estimation of the most popular kernel discrepancies (maximum mean discrepancy, Hilbert-Schmidt independence criterion and kernel Stein discrepancy; MMD, HSIC, KSD) is $n^{-1/2}$ on general topological spaces, and under mild assumptions on the kernel; the same rates are shown (as corollaries) to hold for the estimation of the mean embedding and the centered cross-covariance operator. Our results settle the question of optimal estimation of these kernel discrepancies.
We study robust estimation of simple random tensors of arbitrary order $q\in\mathbb{N}$ under finite-moment assumptions and adversarial contamination. We propose the first robust estimator achieving near-optimal dimension-free statistical rates in this setting. The estimator attains the near-optimal corruption rate whenever $p\ge2q$ moments are finite and continues to provide nontrivial guarantees throughout the weak-moment regime $q\le p\le2q$. Being based on directional trimmed means and minimax aggregation, our estimator is adaptive to $p$ and upper bounds on hypercontractive constants without resorting to interval-intersection procedures. Our analysis extends the trimmed-mean framework underlying recent advances in robust mean and covariance estimation to arbitrary tensor order. In particular, we establish concentration inequalities for higher-order counting and truncated empirical multi-vector product processes. We believe these inequalities could be of independent interest beyond the present application, including algorithmic robust estimation.
R. Oliveira, Zoraida F. Rico, Philip Thompson· 0 citations
Exhaustive moment fitting in this constant-dimensional space produces a proper mixture and, together with the dimension-free moment characterization of Gaussian mixtures, achieves the optimal Hellinger rate in polynomial arithmetic time for every fixed $k$.
We study optimal sampling recovery in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHS) in the uniform norm. For every RKHS with bounded kernel, we establish new comparisons between linear sampling widths and Gelfand widths that overcome the known square-root gap, without requiring a measure or a Christoffel-type condition. Our bounds rely on nested sampling designs obtained by kernel interpolation at (weak) P-greedy points. Under additional (polynomial) decay assumptions the decay rate of the Gelfand widths directly transfers to the sampling widths. With either a logarithmic oversampling or passing to the square root of the Gelfand widths we obtain a direct comparison (requiring no decay assumption) between them. This is particularly effective for super-polynomial decay, such as in Paley-Wiener spaces. Our results follow from representations of both widths in terms of kernel translates and yield, in the opposite direction, a new existence result for a sharp reduced basis selection. Numerical experiments for Legendre, mixed-Sobolev, and Paley-Wiener kernels illustrate our findings.
Sebastian Neumayer, Kateryna Pozharska, T. Ullrich· 0 citations
We propose a unified Kernel Minimum Distance (KMD) framework for estimating and testing models defined by conditional moment restrictions. By embedding conditional moments into a Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS), we construct a closed-form $V$-statistic objective function that quantifies the distance from the restrictions. We establish the $\sqrt{n}$-consistency and asymptotic normality of the associated minimum distance estimator. Within this framework, the minimized objective function naturally yields a consistent omnibus specification test. Unlike projection-based methods that require auxiliary nonparametric estimation for Neyman orthogonalization, our test inherently captures the estimation effect via a projected kernel structure. We derive asymptotic properties of the test statistics under the null hypothesis, the alternative hypothesis, and a sequence of local alternatives converging to the null at the parametric rate $n^{-1/2}$. The validity of a computationally simple multiplier bootstrap is established to facilitate inference. Simulation results demonstrate robust finite-sample performance, and the framework is illustrated by analyzing Engel curves using UK Family Expenditure Survey data.
The results show that sharp converses for minimax quantiles require adapting the information measure to the recovery resolution, whether exact or approximate, and to the tail behaviour of the likelihood ratio.
Because 2SLS is built from sample averages, a small number of observations can have a disproportionate effect on estimates and inference. We introduce W-2SLS, a simple drop-in robustification that replaces these averages by quantile-winsorized means. We analyze W-2SLS under adversarial contamination, which permits both the identities and the reported values of the contaminated observations to depend on the realized clean sample and therefore accommodates targeted or strategic manipulation. Under finite $m$-th moments, W-2SLS attains the minimax-sharp rate $\eta_{n}^{1-\frac1m}+n^{-1/2}$, where $\eta_n$ is the fraction of observations that may be altered. Matching lower bounds identify the exact contamination thresholds for uniform consistency, root-$n$ estimation, and centered Gaussian inference with the same first-order law as clean-sample 2SLS. When $\sqrt{n}\eta_{n}^{1-\frac1m}\to 0$ robustness is first-order free. We also construct feasible heteroskedasticity-robust inference and a winsorized Anderson--Rubin test valid under weak identification and adversarial contamination. Finally, even without contamination, ordinary 2SLS can have poor uniform finite-sample concentration, whereas W-2SLS admits confidence-calibrated sub-Gaussian deviation guarantees.
A. B. Kock, David Preinerstorfer· 0 citations
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