Inverse Density as an Inverse Problem: the Fredholm Equation Approach

Knowing or approximating this ratio is needed in various problems of inference and integration often referred to as importance sampling in statistical inference. It is also closely related to the problem of covariate shift in transfer learning. Our approach is based on reformulating the problem of estimating the ratio as an inverse problem in terms of an integral operator corresponding to a kernel, known as the Fredholm problem of the first kind. This formulation, combined with the techniques of regularization leads to a principled framework for constructing algorithms and for analyzing them theoretically. The resulting family of algorithms (FIRE, for Fredholm Inverse Regularized Estimator) is flexible, simple and easy to implement.