Drifting objectives compare a target and model distribution through a vector field observed noisily at finitely many locations. We ask what distributional conclusion such a frozen measurement system warrants. For integrable antisymmetric interactions and absolutely continuous laws in a declared finite density basis, the unnormalized sampled numerator satisfies $\operatorname{vec}(V_X)=Mc$, where $c$ is an antisymmetric mismatch and $M$ is probe-dependent. This identity yields an a posteriori total-variation (TV) upper confidence bound accounting for held-out field noise, estimated-operator error, and externally validated $L^1$ residual radii around normalized density approximants in the span; a nonpositive observability margin returns the trivial TV bound and abstains. The audit recomputes this numerator from held-out samples; a normalized drift statistic requires a separate joint numerator--denominator analysis. For Gaussian-RBF interactions, a global envelope supports distribution-free and empirical-Bernstein radii without truncation, with companion bounds for the Laplace similarity in the original drifting objective. We characterize random-probe observability by a population Gram matrix, identify rank and symmetry degeneracies, and prove large-bandwidth collapse toward mean matching. Synthetic studies exercise Gaussian and Laplace numerators, separately prespecified bounded-vector and variance-adaptive radii, Monte Carlo-calibrated operators, nonzero residual radii around normalized finite-basis approximants, outward-rounded observability bounds, and designed abstention. A joint basis-size/dimension stress path extends evaluation through $m=8$. The result is a conditional diagnostic for a finite density class, or for normalized finite-basis density approximants with external residual radii, not a universal guarantee from small training drift.
This work constructs a proposal that dominates the target by a known constant, generally unavailable for non-Gaussian state space models, yielding independent exact smoothing draws and an unbiased likelihood estimator whose relative variance is at most $1/p-1$ per draw at acceptance probability $p$.
The distribution of a normal mean-variance mixture depends on the law of its positive mixing variable. We compare six parametric mixing laws with a grid nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator under the same determinant identification constraint. The mixing mean $m=\E(Z)$ is estimated and is not fixed at one. A paired block bootstrap is used to compare multivariate holdout log scores. The models that cannot be distinguished from the model with the largest score define a finite ambiguity set. We then consider a cumulative prospect problem on a common portfolio direction. For each model in the set, the NMVM representation gives a scalar projected return and a corresponding prospect-value function of the exposure. The distributionally robust decision maximizes the lower envelope of these functions. We prove existence of a solution, give the candidate points for the piecewise smooth problem, derive a reference-gap scaling result, and construct an interval branch-and-bound certificate for the finite-scenario optimum. In an application to 30 stock returns, the mixture models give higher holdout density scores than the multivariate Gaussian model. Several parametric and semi-parametric models, however, remain in the ambiguity set. The worst-case model is therefore determined at the portfolio optimization stage rather than selected in advance from a point estimate of the holdout score.
Martingale posteriors quantify uncertainty by forward-imputing observations from one-step-ahead predictive distributions, but implementations stop after finitely many imputations. For the empirical P\'olya-urn posterior of a quantile the law of the stopped state is derived. The quantile of the stopped urn measure keeps the familiar martingale tail-sum variance fraction; the deployed stochastic-approximation tracker with frozen gain $c$ does not. Its variance carries an explicit factor $G_a$ with $a=cf_0(q_\tau)$, which may fall below or exceed the tail fraction, and a density-adapted gain restores calibration through a density-free inflation. Shared urn innovations yield the joint law of finitely many quantile levels. For conditional quantile regression, a smoothed martingale posterior started at the ordinary quantile-regression estimator with a full inverse-Jacobian matrix gain satisfies a process Bernstein--von Mises theorem with calibrated finite-horizon bands; scalar or diagonal gains cannot match the sandwich covariance process.
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 $k$.
This work proposes a Gaussian refit for kernel ridge regression by Anderson's inequality, which requires no moment assumptions and is calibrated at any confidence level via order statistics, and extends empirically to nonlinear constrained estimators and real spatial data.
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
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