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Poster

A Unified Maximum Likelihood Approach for Estimating Symmetric Properties of Discrete Distributions

Jayadev Acharya · Hirakendu Das · Alon Orlitsky · Ananda Suresh

Gallery #128

Abstract:

Symmetric distribution properties such as support size, support coverage, entropy, and proximity to uniformity, arise in many applications. Recently, researchers applied different estimators and analysis tools to derive asymptotically sample-optimal approximations for each of these properties. We show that a single, simple, plug-in estimator---\emph{profile maximum likelihood (PML)}--is sample competitive for all symmetric properties, and in particular is asymptotically sample-optimal for all the above properties.

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