Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

For the moment, it is worth noting that such sets of functions (e.g., Haar wavelets, Daubechies wavelets) are readily We are now in a position to present the main theorem of this subsection. To avoid repetition, we defer further discussions on the rates observed in Theorem A.1 to Remark 2.7 where a holistic In fact, by Proposition 1.1, there exists an optimal transport map Based on (B.2), the natural plug-in estimator of ρ Suppose that the same assumptions from Theorem 2.2 hold. B.2 Nonparametric independence testing: Optimal transport based Hilbert-Schmidt independence criterion Proposition B.2 shows that the test based on Further, when the sampling distribution is fixed, Proposition B.2 shows that In the following result (see Appendix C.2 for a proof), we show that if This section is devoted to proving our main results and is organized as follows: In Appendix C.1, we Further by Lemma D.2, we also have: ϕ Note that (C.10) immediately yields the following conclusions: S By (1.5) and some simple algebra, the following holds: null null null S Combining the above display with (C.9), we further have: null null null null 1 2 W Combining the above observation with Theorem 2.1, we have: lim sup For the next part, to simplify notation, let us begin with some notation. By using the exponential Markov's inequality coupled with the standard union Now by using [7, Theorem 2.10], we have P (B We are now in a position to complete the proof of Theorem 2.2 using steps I-III. Therefore, it is now enough to bound the right hand side of (C.17).

We seek an entropy estimator for discrete distributions with fully empirical accuracy bounds. As stated, this goal is infeasible without some prior assumptions on the distribution. We discover that a certain information moment assumption renders the problem feasible. We argue that the moment assumption is natural and, in some sense, minimalistic -- weaker than finite support or tail decay conditions. Under the moment assumption, we provide the first finite-sample entropy estimates for infinite alphabets, nearly recovering the known minimax rates. Moreover, we demonstrate that our empirical bounds are significantly sharper than the state-ofthe-art bounds, for various natural distributions and non-trivial sample regimes. Along the way, we give a dimension-free analogue of the Cover-Thomas result on entropy continuity (with respect to total variation distance) for finite alphabets, which may be of independent interest.

Optimal transport maps between two probability distributions $\mu$ and $\nu$ on $\R^d$ have found extensive applications in both machine learning and statistics. In practice, these maps need to be estimated from data sampled according to $\mu$ and $\nu$. Plug-in estimators are perhaps most popular in estimating transport maps in the field of computational optimal transport. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive analysis of the rates of convergences for general plug-in estimators defined via barycentric projections. Our main contribution is a new stability estimate for barycentric projections which proceeds under minimal smoothness assumptions and can be used to analyze general plug-in estimators. We illustrate the usefulness of this stability estimate by first providing rates of convergence for the natural discrete-discrete and semi-discrete estimators of optimal transport maps.

Unmeasured confounding can render identification strategies based on adjustment functionals invalid. We study the "Napkin graph", a causal structure that encapsulates patterns of M-bias, instrumental variables, and the classical back-door and front-door models within a single graphical framework, yet requires a nonstandard identification strategy: the average treatment effect is expressed as a ratio of two g-formulas. We develop novel estimators for this functional, including doubly robust one-step and targeted minimum loss-based estimators that remain asymptotically linear when nuisance functions are estimated at slower-than-parametric rates using machine learning. We also show how a generalized independence restriction encoded by the Napkin graph, known as a Verma constraint, can be exploited to improve efficiency, illustrating more generally how such constraints in hidden variable DAGs can inform semiparametric inference. The proposed methods are validated through simulations and applied to the Finnish Life Course study to estimate the effect of educational attainment on income. An accompanying R package, napkincausal, implements all proposed procedures.

In this work, we generalize the notion of a von Neumann winner to the multi-criteria setting by taking inspiration from Blackwell's approachability.