Minimax Optimal Rates of Estimation in High Dimensional Additive Models: Universal Phase Transition

Our results reveal an interesting phase transition behavior universal to this class of high dimensional problems. In the sparse regime when the components are sufficiently smooth or the dimensionality is sufficiently large, the optimal rates are identical to those for high dimensional linear regression, and therefore there is no additional cost to entertain a nonparametric model. Otherwise, in the so-called smooth regime, the rates coincide with the optimal rates for estimating a univariate function, and therefore they are immune to the "curse of dimensionality". Key words: Convergence rate, method of regularization, minimax optimality, phase transition, reproducing kernel Hilbert space, Sobolev space. 2 1 Introduction With the recent advances in science and technology, high dimensional regression problems have become ubiquitous in a multitude of areas - genomics, medical imaging, and finance are a few well known examples. Considerable amount of research effort has been devoted to the understanding of challenges brought about by the high dimensionality, and development of statistical methodology to counter them.