Papers

The Bradley-Terry model is a parametric model for ranking from pairwise comparisons. Existing asymptotic theory for the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) in regimes where the number of objects grows often requires homogeneity assumptions or compatibility conditions on comparison graphs, which limits its applicability to many practical settings. In this work, we establish uniform consistency of the MLE under general deterministic comparison designs. Our pairwise error bound consists of a pair-specific term governed by the effective resistance between the corresponding objects and a global term governed by the spectral gap of the unnormalized graph Laplacian. The bound is tight up to logarithmic factors for certain graph sequences. For any prespecified sequence of pairs satisfying an additional balancing condition, we further establish asymptotic normality of the corresponding estimated utility differences. As an application, we obtain uniform consistency for independent-edge random graph designs whenever the minimum edge probability exceeds the Erdős-Rényi connectivity threshold by a logarithmic factor, as well as asymptotic normality under additional balancing conditions.

This paper studies online quantile regression for large-scale and streaming data using Stochastic SubGradient Descent (SSGD) with constant learning rates. Classical offline inference for quantile regression is computationally and memory intensive. Existing works of online inference for quantile regression provide only asymptotic guarantees and typically require sub-exponential tail conditions for distribution theory. To bridge these gaps, we introduce new techniques to prove a quenched central limit theorem (CLT) and finite-sample Gaussian approximation for SSGD under a finite-moment assumption. We further show that Ruppert-Polyak averaging with a constant learning rate has a non-vanishing bias and fails to satisfy CLT centering at the population target. Hence we propose suffix averaging to address this issue and establish its finite-sample Gaussian approximation. Based on these results, we provide an efficient online inference method for quantile regression that avoids covariance estimation. Numerical experiments show that our method achieves desirable empirical coverage rates and competitive performance compared to other inference methods. We also apply our approach to U.S. wage data to demonstrate its practical effectiveness.

We study exact support recovery under $(\epsilon,\delta)$-differential privacy in sparse high-dimensional linear regression. We introduce Saturated Propose-test-release, a general mechanism that privately releases the output of a discrete selector with probability one once its stability certificate reaches a finite threshold. Exploiting the coordinatewise geometry of the LASSO, we construct a computable support-stability score. The resulting computationally efficient Saturated LASSO satisfies worst-case $(\epsilon,\delta)$-differential privacy and achieves exact support recovery with high probability under explicit regularity and beta-min conditions. Maximizing sparsity-indexed certificates yields an adaptive procedure requiring no sparsity knowledge and having exactly the same finite-sample exact-recovery risk as the oracle fixed-sparsity procedure under common public tuning parameters. We also establish a minimax lower bound explicitly tracking $\delta$: under its recovery conditions, Saturated LASSO is minimax optimal up to logarithmic factors in $n$ and $1/\delta$ uniformly over $0 < \delta \leq \epsilon/16$; in the broad moderate-$\delta$ regime, it further matches the lower-bound $\delta$-dependence. A complementary information-theoretic construction with known sparsity attains the lower-bound rates up to constant factors under independent Gaussian design, at exponential computational cost. Simulations and a semi-synthetic study using public American Community Survey covariates illustrate the numerical performance of the proposed procedures.

We construct a feasible two-step estimator for the elasticity parameter in small-noise CEV-type diffusions. Under joint small-noise and high-frequency asymptotics, we establish its consistency and an $\varepsilon^{-1}$ central limit theorem with an explicit asymptotic variance. We adapt a Lamperti-based transformation strategy to elasticity inference for a CEV process with an attainable, absorbing $0$ boundary. Under a local-to-CEV scaling, an auxiliary CKLS process and a Girsanov change of measure yield a strictly positive CIR-type benchmark in which the elasticity is recast as a linear-drift parameter. A preliminary elasticity estimator based on local realized variance supplies the unknown parameter in the state mapping, yielding a feasible LSE-type estimator. The asymptotic theory combines control of the CKLS-to-CEV path-replacement error, total-variation closeness between the original and changed measures, and asymptotic negligibility of the preliminary plug-in error, thereby transferring the auxiliary CIR limit theory to the feasible estimator under the original measure.

We study the finite-sample properties of estimators of a broad class of normalized scale-invariant inequality indices (NSIIs) under finite Gamma mixture models. The class includes the Gini coefficient, the $m$th Gini index, the Extended $m$th Gini index, linear order-statistic inequality indices, and several entropy- and dispersion-based measures. Building on the Gamma–Dirichlet representation, we derive exact expressions for the expectation and finite-sample bias of the natural estimator of an NSII based on a $U$-statistic when the population follows a finite Gamma mixture with a common rate parameter. The resulting bias formula explicitly characterizes the effects of the mixture weights and component shape parameters. We also establish that the bias converges to zero as the sample size increases, yielding asymptotic unbiasedness. Furthermore, we derive exact finite-sample expressions for the variance and mean squared error of the estimator by accounting for the overlap structure among the subsets entering the $U$-statistic. In addition, we establish strong consistency and asymptotic normality. When the mixture degenerates to a single Gamma distribution, the finite-sample bias vanishes, recovering the exact unbiasedness result previously obtained for NSIIs under the Gamma model. Numerical illustrations and simulation studies are provided to investigate the finite-sample behavior of the estimator and to illustrate the theoretical findings. Overall, the proposed framework provides a unified characterization of finite-sample estimation under heterogeneous Gamma populations and quantifies the effects of mixture heterogeneity on bias, variance, and mean squared error.

In the context of functional data analysis, we propose a Bayesian test to assess whether the mean function of a Gaussian population is identically zero. By leveraging the structure of the reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) associated with the covariance function of the underlying process, we approximate the mean by a finite linear combination of kernel sections. This finite-dimensional representation arises from the natural assumption that the mean lies in the corresponding RKHS, enabling a parametric Bayesian approach to hypothesis testing through a spike-and-slab prior on the coefficients. Given the absence of a canonical reference measure on infinite-dimensional spaces, the likelihood is expressed via a Radon-Nikodym derivative between induced Gaussian measures. Since the number of kernel sections is unknown, we employ reversible jump Markov chain Monte Carlo (RJMCMC) to explore the trans-dimensional parameter space and estimate the posterior distribution. From the resulting posterior samples we construct estimators of the posterior probability of the null hypothesis and the Bayes factor, providing quantifiable evidence against the null and supporting informed decisions under uncertainty. Furthermore, to validate this methodology we establish near-optimal posterior contraction rates for the proposed test under mild conditions, demonstrate its empirical performance on simulated data sets, and illustrate its application with real climate data.

The polynomial maximization method estimates signal parameters in non-Gaussian noise from a finite description of the noise by its moments and cumulants, without a density. Known accuracy results assume that these noise characteristics are known, or use a design in which estimating them jointly costs no accuracy. In practice they are estimated from the residuals of a preliminary fit, and the effect of this substitution on accuracy is unknown. We treat the feasible scheme as a two-step estimator and, for a general smooth signal model in a fixed design, find the increment of its asymptotic covariance in closed form: $\Sigma_{\rm fe}-\Sigma_{\rm or}=c_2(1-g_{\rm or}) Q^{-1}\bar{d}\bar{d}^{\top}Q^{-1}$, a positive semidefinite matrix of rank at most one. Here $c_2$ is the noise variance, $g_{\rm or}\le 1$ the oracle variance reduction factor, and $Q$ and $\bar{d}$ the second-moment matrix and mean of the signal gradient over the design. Estimating the fractional moments that form the weights costs no first-order accuracy, because that block is orthogonal; the whole increment comes from estimating the sign-preserving centering means. The increment lies along the single direction $Q^{-1}\bar{d}$, so linear combinations of the parameters orthogonal to it keep oracle accuracy. In the trace metric the variance reduction factor becomes $g_{\rm fe}=g_{\rm or}+(1-g_{\rm or})R_D$, where $R_D=\|Q^{-1}\bar{d}\|^2/{\rm tr} Q^{-1}$ depends on the design alone. We give four sufficient conditions for first-order oracle equivalence; noise symmetry is not among them. Monte Carlo experiments with a harmonic signal confirm the direction and size of the increment. A covariance estimate that ignores the increment undercovers where non-Gaussianity gives the largest gain, symmetric noise included.

Clinical trials with survival endpoints lose information when participants are censored before death is observed. We develop target-preserving estimators that use posttreatment disease history, such as recurrence or progression, to recover information lost to censoring for marginal survival and restricted mean survival effects. The difficulty is that the intermediate event is downstream of treatment: naive adjustment can change the causal estimand, and the useful information enters only through the observed coarsening. We derive observed-data influence functions with and without recurrence history and obtain an exact gain identity. The identity shows that efficiency improvement is driven by the censoring hazard, the split of the alive risk set into recurrence states, and the residual-survival separation between those states. In the no-covariate illness-death model, the Aalen-Johansen estimator realizes the recurrence-augmented efficient score after standardization to the marginal target. With covariates, correctly specified Cox-Breslow transition hazards provide a root-N plug-in benchmark, while a hazard-induced one-step estimator gives rate robustness and, under primitive transition and censoring learner rates, canonical inference with a second-order product remainder. A semi-synthetic metastatic breast cancer study calibrated from digitized progression-free survival and overall survival curves illustrates the gain identity. The framework applies broadly to censored time-to-event studies with informative intermediate histories.

Dose optimisation of two-agent combinations in early-phase oncology trials must jointly balance toxicity, efficacy, and pharmacologically meaningful drug exposure, yet existing model-assisted combination designs use only binary toxicity–efficacy outcomes and leave pharmacokinetic (PK) data unused for dosing decisions. We propose PKComb-BOIN12, a utility-based Bayesian optimal interval design embedding a continuous PK exposure metric into two-agent dose optimisation via a PK-guided escalation rule and a PK-sufficiency constraint on the final admissible set. Two contributions distinguish this design from a direct combination extension of existing single-agent PK-informed designs. First, PK-based elimination uses a coordinatewise order-ideal (down-set) removal rule, so that eliminating a combination for insufficient exposure is licensed exactly by the assumed monotonicity of exposure in each agent's dose, rather than an unjustified scalar summary of combined dose intensity. Second, the pre-specified target exposure is treated as transportable-but-verifiable: a hierarchical calibration mechanism updates the assumed monotherapy-derived target using accruing combination-arm PK data, with a formal bound on the resulting selection bias under transportability violations. A time-to-event extension, TITE-PKComb-BOIN12, accommodates late-onset outcomes. A factorial simulation study spanning realistic scenarios, including one calibrated to a published combination trial, decomposes the source of PKComb-BOIN12's gains over its non-PK predecessor and evaluates robustness to non-monotone exposure, PK-variance misspecification, and target-transportability violations. An R Shiny application supports design evaluation and real-time conduct.

We study the non-parametric estimation of the roughness of a path from discretely sampled observations. Our approach is based on the concept of normalized power variation of a path. The estimator identifies a variation index by comparing coarse increments with local sums of fine increments. We prove pathwise consistency under Hölder regularity, nondegenerate coarse critical power sums, uniform local bounds on fine critical power sums, and separation of the two sampling scales and obtain a convergence rate for the estimator. Neither convergence of critical variation nor monotonicity of the finite-sample statistic is required. The result applies to fractional Brownian motion under an explicit dyadic sampling rule and to Schauder series with bounded coefficients bounded away from zero. For signed Takagi–Landsberg functions we obtain a uniform asymptotic formula and a quantitative bound for every root of the estimating equation in a fixed parameter interval. We illustrate the results with numerical experiments for Takagi– Landsberg functions and fractional Brownian motion.

Fréchet regression provides a framework for predicting random object-valued responses by minimizing the conditional expected squared distances. We propose semi-supervised kernel ridge Fréchet regression (SS-KRFR) to exploit unlabeled covariates when labeled samples are scarce. The method learns kernel spectral features from both labeled and unlabeled covariates, then utilizes labeled responses to estimate the conditional Fréchet function by kernel ridge regression. We derive prediction error bounds that distinguish the roles of labeled and unlabeled samples, and establish polynomial convergence rates under suitable conditions. Under additional kernel assumptions, a sharper analysis relaxes the sample size requirements for learning the features. We also develop hybrids that combine features, predictions, or both from models fitted with and without unlabeled covariates, establishing uniform stability over mixing weights in Hadamard spaces at common tuning and a separate rate guarantee for prediction mixing. Simulations and a real-data application show semi-supervised gains and improvements over competing Fréchet regression methods in several settings.

We consider multivariate Poisson autoregressive processes evolving on random networks generated by a Stochastic Block Model. This framework extends existing network Poisson autoregressions by incorporating latent community structure and allowing for non-Markovian dependence, both excitatory and inhibitory. We establish a mean-field approximation and prove that the finite system converges to its limit at the optimal rate $N^{-1/2}$ in the quenched setting with overwhelming probability, both on average and in uniform norm. Our analysis yields quantitative error bounds that are explicit in the time horizon and, under suitable stability conditions, remain polynomial or uniform in time, thereby avoiding the exponential growth typically associated with Grönwall-type arguments. As a consequence, the mean-field approximation is shown to hold uniformly over any time horizon. We further demonstrate how the approximation can be exploited to reduce the computational complexity of parametric inference from $\mathcal{O}(N^2T^2)$ to $\mathcal{O}(NT^2)$. The results provide a theoretical foundation for the analysis and inference of count-valued processes on large random networks with community structure.

Generative foundation models are attracting interest for their ability to produce desired outputs from demonstrations given at inference time, without updating parameters. However, since a few demonstrations cannot uniquely identify the intended task, the challenge is how to learn and sample from an output distribution that reflects this task uncertainty. In this work, we theoretically analyze how a Diffusion Transformer (DiT), pretrained across diverse tasks, learns and generates predictive distributions for a new query from demonstrations. We first show that the natural target to generate from finite demonstrations is not an output derived from estimating a single task, but rather a predictive distribution that captures the task uncertainty remaining after observing the demonstrations. We then prove that a DiT can learn this predictive distribution through score estimation, using attention to aggregate information from demonstrations and diffusion to generate samples. Owing to this property, with sufficient pretraining resources and diffusion sampling steps, the resulting DiT achieves the minimax optimal rate over a Hölder class of test-time tasks. These results imply that DiT acts as a statistically grounded in-context generator capable of generating distributions adapted to new tasks while retaining the uncertainty inherent in finite demonstrations.

We present a unified, transformation-free linear regression framework tailored for ordinal compositional data, such as distributions across educational levels or aggregate Likert-scale survey responses. Traditional log-ratio approaches often obscure interpretability, ignore the inherent ordering of categories, and struggle with boundary zero values. To overcome these limitations, we propose a deterministic model constrained to the space of column-stochastic transformation matrices, naturally preserving the fundamental geometry of the simplex. By adopting the weighted 1-Wasserstein distance as the loss function, our method directly embeds the ordinal nature of the data into the estimation process. We provide a computationally efficient and globally optimal solution explicitly formulated as a Linear Programming (LP) problem. The framework systematically addresses four distinct regression scenarios, introducing a novel ordinal tensor product to rigorously handle interactions across multiple compositional predictors. Furthermore, we equip the model with a suitable regularization strategy and novel diagnostic tools, including a Wasserstein-based coefficient of determination ($R^2_W$) and an Order Preservation Index (OPI). Extensive simulation studies and two empirical applications demonstrate the robust predictive performance and interpretability of the proposed methodology.

Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI) is a core measure of testing word association, and Skip-gram with Negative Sampling (SGNS) is essentially a method that implicitly factorizes a shifted PMI matrix. However, a systematic and well-rounded characterization of finite-sample uncertainty in PMI estimation remains absent and imperative to venture into. We provide a statistical framework for PMI estimation and its connection to SGNS. We prove consistency, asymptotic unbiasedness, and asymptotic normality of the empirical PMI estimator, derive its variance via the Delta method, and, applying stochastic approximation theory, obtain a variance decomposition for SGNS-based PMI estimation that separates data variance from optimization variance. Simulation experiments validate the Delta method approximation. Real-data experiments on the Brown Corpus (d = 100) reveal that SGNS systematically deviates from the theoretical relationship PMI + log K. The empirical relationship shows an attenuated PMI coefficient, an amplified log K effect, and a positive intercept, indicating systematic bias. Word analogy validation confirms the models are effective. The failure to validate the variance decomposition under low-dimensional conditions does not diminish its theoretical value; rather, it identifies the unbiasedness assumption as the key bottleneck and clarifies the gap between asymptotic theory and practice, providing implications for both practice and theory.

In many scientific studies, evaluating the association between two responses requires adjusting for shared covariates. The expected conditional covariance measures this adjusted association and is used in conditional independence testing and treatment effect estimation. Researchers often estimate it using fitted conditional means, but removing the bias caused by the estimation errors of these conditional means remains a difficult task. This difficulty can increase when the true covariate density is unknown and restricted only by known upper and lower bounds. In this article, we study how accurately the expected conditional covariance can be estimated under these density bounds. We propose a multiresolution estimator that reduces bias without estimating the density. Theoretical results show that, for bounded responses and rough regression functions, an unknown density slows the optimal worst-case rate by a power of sample size compared with a known density. We establish that the optimal rate under density bounds alone strictly improves upon the previously conjectured polynomial rate by a sub-polynomial factor, resolving a long-standing conjecture. Our estimator attains this rate up to a logarithmic factor. Through simulations and a real data resampling experiment on diamonds, we show that our method can yield smaller mean squared errors than standard uncorrected estimators.

Observing a prediction error at one node can help correct predictions elsewhere, but the benefit depends on the residual dependence between nodes. A graph suggests where that dependence might occur, yet does not establish its sign or strength. We develop a Bayesian model of residual covariance to determine how revealed errors should update a fixed feature-based predictor. For a fixed set of revealed nodes, we derive an exact identity for the change in expected squared error under linear residual propagation. The identity characterizes the optimal linear update and expresses the excess error of any other update as an exact quadratic. Under covariance uncertainty, the Bayes-optimal fixed linear update uses the posterior mean covariance. We average over four positive-semidefinite covariance families representing no dependence, positive dependence, negative dependence, and dependence whose sign can alternate with graph distance. Across eight graph benchmarks, four show posterior support within the distance-profile family for negative covariance between neighbors and alternating signs with distance. Among the evaluated methods, ours achieves the smallest worst-case recall gap to the best method on each graph. The method improves squared error over residual propagation on five of eight graphs, but performs substantially worse on one dense heterophilous graph. In these experiments, selecting the highest-posterior family performs similarly to model averaging.

We consider inference for network stochastic differential equations in a small-noise, high-dimensional regime, where the diffusion coefficient vanishes with $\ep\to0$ while the network size and parameter dimension may diverge. We develop a minimum-distance estimation framework based on a deterministic measurement model that may omit nuisance terms in the drift, and derive a non-asymptotic error bound decomposing the estimation error into stochastic fluctuation, nuisance discrepancy, and identifiability terms. For a linearly parametrized interaction model under repeated measurements, we obtain explicit non-asymptotic bounds on the nuisance discrepancy and the identifiability gap in terms of graph connectivity and noise level. Under suitable mixing and balance conditions, this yields consistency and convergence rates for the estimator. We further study graph recovery via adaptive Lasso. The penalized estimator is shown to inherit the rate of the preliminary estimator and to recover the true interaction graph consistently. These results provide a theoretical basis for parameter estimation and edge selection in high-dimensional network SDEs with nuisance drift components.

We introduce an algorithm for efficiently preconditioning log-concave and log-smooth distributions that scales logarithmically with the condition number of the underlying distribution. Based on Gaussian cooling, our multistage method approximately samples from a sequence of well-conditioned distributions to construct a preconditioner for each subsequent stage of the cooling schedule. This method is motivated by existing practical approaches for mass matrix estimation in Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), in which an effective preconditioner for the target distribution is estimated from samples produced during a warm-up period. However, our approach is conceptually distinct from existing approaches and moreover permits theoretical analysis. Our algorithmic framework is flexible, allowing essentially any log-concave sampling algorithm to act as the subroutine within each cooling stage. For instance, using first-order rejection sampling (FORS) as the sampler, the first-order query complexity of our method is $\tilde{O}(d^{4/3} \log \kappa)$ for a large class of log-concave and log-smooth distributions with condition number $\kappa$ and $\tilde{O}(d^{1/3} \log \kappa)$ for translation-invariant distributions. In the translation-invariant setting, we provide numerical experiments for the lattice $\phi^4$ model, a simple lattice field theory.

We prove a Chernoff-exponent guarantee for the output of spectrally initialized batch variational EM after a prescribed iteration budget, without assuming global maximization of its variational objective. The iteration repeatedly estimates the entire block probability matrix and community proportions from the same sparse graph. We consider a fixed number of communities with proportions bounded away from zero and fixed, positive, distinct connectivity profiles; neither assortativity nor full rank is required. The algorithm uses simultaneous softmax updates without sample splitting or posterior thresholding. Its analysis must control the feedback between estimated parameters, soft labels and reused edges at an exponentially small risk scale. We establish a uniform one-step bound over data-dependent soft assignments whose random remainder has exponentially small expectation. Combined with an exponentially reliable regularized spectral initializer, this yields an unconditional expected misclassification rate bounded by $\exp\{-(1-o(1))J_n\}$ throughout the sparse, diverging-degree regime, where $J_n$ is the minimum nodewise Chernoff information. Matching lower bounds establish first-order logarithmic minimax optimality on local parameter spaces allowing unknown connectivity and varying community counts. The algorithm also attains the sharp first-order exact-recovery threshold. Numerical experiments illustrate refinement gains and sensitivity to initialization and imbalance.

We consider the ill-posed inverse problem of recovering the drift potential of an overdamped Langevin diffusion from discrete, possibly irregular position observations. Specializing the suboptimality gap for inverse stochastic control to drift-potential recovery, we parametrize the associated value function in a finite basis. Under a basis nondegeneracy condition, the resulting Galerkin estimator is obtained from one positive-definite linear system whose entries are smooth functionals of the empirical time marginals; no transition density is required. The gap equals one half of the squared energy distance to the true potential, yielding a best-approximation identity and energy-seminorm consistency as the basis becomes complete. At a fixed basis, we separate the sample fluctuation from the time-quadrature error, thereby avoiding the Euler–Maruyama $O(\Delta t)$ drift-discretization bias. We also analyze the finite basis as regularization, give a dimension-dependent convergence rate for a concrete basis family, and bound observation-noise bias. One- and two-dimensional experiments verify the predicted sampling-interval behavior. An application to irregular animal telemetry illustrates the method on a single long trajectory.

We establish statistical consistency for the penalized maximum-likelihood estimator underlying CPLASS, a method for detecting changes in velocity in $d$-dimensional time-series data. The signal is modeled as a continuous piecewise-linear trajectory observed with independent Gaussian noise. Unlike classical change-in-mean models, continuity across adjacent segments couples their parameters and prevents direct application of standard segmentation arguments. Under compact parameter spaces, minimum segment-length and velocity-jump conditions, and a strengthened Schwarz information criterion penalty $\rho_k(\log n)^\gamma$ with $\gamma>1$, we prove joint consistency of the estimated number of segments and all changepoint locations in the high-frequency regime $n\to\infty$. The maximum changepoint-location error is $O_{\mathbb{P}}\{(\log n/n)^{1/2}\}$. The proof first uses empirical-process theory to establish convergence of the fitted signal, variance, and likelihood for each fixed model size. It then combines overfitting and underfitting arguments with a two-stage geometric localization analysis, yielding an initial $(\log n/n)^{1/3}$ rate that is sharpened by exploiting the local two-segment continuous piecewise-linear structure.

We study pointwise estimation of a smooth binomial mixing density and characterize its minimax rates. Assuming that the mixing density is $s$-Hölder smooth, we first consider the homogeneous setting with a common number of binomial trials $t$. We derive matching lower and upper bounds that reveal three regimes depending on the relative sizes of the sample size $n$ and the number of trials $t$. When $t$ is small, the finite number of trials creates an identification barrier that persists regardless of sample size; at intermediate $t$, more data reduce sampling uncertainty, while the number of trials limits how finely the mixing density can be recovered; and when $t$ is sufficiently large, the usual nonparametric density estimation rate is recovered. Our lower bounds exploit the polynomial structure of the binomial mixture model, while attainability is achieved by a suitably regularized orthogonal series estimator. We then extend the analysis to heterogeneous trial parameters, where the minimax rate depends on the full trial profile through the effective sample size available at each polynomial degree. These results characterize the fundamental statistical limits of learning smooth populations of binomial probabilities under both homogeneous and heterogeneous trials.

We consider the estimation of the invariant distribution $\pi$ of a Markov kernel on a discrete state space (or of the mean value $\pi(f)$ of a functional $f$ under $\pi$) when solving the invariance equation is not feasible. Look-ahead estimators exploit the knowledge of the kernel by propagating the empirical occupation measure through $k$ steps of the chain. When the kernel is known, as in Markov chain Monte Carlo, we compare their mean squared error with that of the empirical estimator, for independent or Markovian data, stationary or not. Our main result establishes that, for Markovian data, the one-step estimator always improves on the empirical one asymptotically, and that the improvement grows with $k$ for reversible kernels. A non-reversible counterexample shows that reversibility cannot simply be dropped. In the statistical setting where the kernel belongs to a parametric family with unknown parameter, we introduce plug-in look-ahead estimators, which perform the look-ahead step with an estimated kernel. When the parameter is estimated at the parametric rate, we give a necessary and sufficient condition under which the plug-in look-ahead estimator outperforms the empirical one. The theoretical results are illustrated by extensive simulation studies, which also shed further light on the behaviour of the estimators at hand. Both settings are finally applied to real data arising from geographical mobility problems in the Lyon metropolitan area, France.

Whether a mortality model needs a Makeham term, the constant representing background mortality, is commonly decided with a likelihood-ratio test. The constant cannot be negative, so testing its absence places it on a boundary, where the usual chi-squared calibration fails. Assuming independent Poisson death counts and standard regularity conditions, we show that when the constant is the only parameter on a boundary the statistic converges to an equal mixture of a point mass at zero and a chi-squared distribution with one degree of freedom: at the 5% level the critical value is 2.71, not 3.84. We state conditions under which the correction holds for Makeham models, verify them for Gompertz–Makeham and gamma-Gompertz–Makeham, and quantify the information about the constant, which fixes the local power, the smallest detectable term, and the loss of detectability as the age window narrows. When a gamma-frailty variance is estimated at a true value of zero, the limit is no longer a chi-squared mixture and the correction rejects too often. Monte Carlo experiments show the conventional cutoff rejecting at half the nominal level, a correctly calibrated test missing a term at its detection threshold in most samples, and excess rejections persisting as exposure grows.

We develop a Bayesian framework for learning nonlinear operators between infinite-dimensional spaces. Given a map $g_0:\mathcal{X}\to\mathcal{Y}$ between separable Hilbert spaces, we study the recovery of $g_0$ from $n\in\mathbb{N}$ noisy input-output pairs $(\boldsymbol{X},\boldsymbol{Z})=(X_i,Z_i)_{i=1}^n$ with $Z_i= g_0 (X_i ) + E_i$. Here the $X_i\in\mathcal{X}$ are randomly drawn 'design' points in a compact subset of $\mathcal X$, and the $E_i$ are assumed to be i.i.d. draws from a Gaussian white noise process indexed by $\mathcal{Y}$. For any 'operator-valued' prior $\mathbb{P}_G$ supported on the space of continuous operators, we show existence of the posterior $\mathbb P_{G|(\boldsymbol{X},\boldsymbol{Z})}$ as a regular conditional distribution, and provide a characterization of its Radon-Nikodym derivative. For Gaussian priors, we establish algebraic (in the sample size $n$) convergence rates for the posterior mean towards the ground truth; this corresponds to a ridge regularized kernel estimator. Moreover, we show that the posterior mean is minimax optimal (up to logarithmic factors) over hyperrectangles when the smoothness of the prior matches that of the ground truth. To illustrate the applicability of our analysis, we derive explicit learning rates for the Darcy flow solution operator.

The analysis of large data panels is important in econometrics and beyond. Prediction and inference methods for such data typically rely on simplifying model assumptions for the covariance structure of errors. One convenient assumption is what we call groupwise sphericity: that errors are uncorrelated across individuals and have constant variance within certain groups. While theoretically useful, in large panels groupwise sphericity is often too restrictive to apply in practice. We therefore develop new quantitative inference tools to test whether deviations from this model assumption are practically relevant. Our approach covers both large-dimensional data matrices and regression panels, in a regime where the cross-sectional dimension is proportional to the sample size. The theory is based on the analysis of extreme eigenvalues of the empirical covariance matrix and uses recent advances in random matrix theory. Numerical experiments demonstrate accurate size control and good power in finite samples.

Cross-fitting is routine in much of applied research. While conventional confidence intervals that ignore cross-fold dependence are asymptotically valid in several settings, they undercover in many applications that share a common form of nonregularity: from the classic cross-validation problem of testing whether a fitted model outperforms another, to testing for heterogeneous treatment effects with machine learning, to estimating the value of a potentially non-unique optimal treatment regime. Exploiting a new locality condition, I show that a large class of cross-fitting estimators still satisfies a central limit theorem despite the nonregularity, but with an asymptotic variance that must be adjusted for the cross-fold correlation. Then, I propose a method for estimating this correlation and construct new confidence intervals that attain asymptotically nominal coverage. Finally, I show that the proposed confidence intervals attain approximately nominal coverage in a simulation study with random forests and neural networks.

This paper investigates non-parametric regression estimation when the explanatory variable takes values in a separable Hilbert space and observations are sampled over an increasing regular spatial lattice. Under a rigorous field-to-field independence setup between covariates and errors, we explore the structural and asymptotic concentration properties of the functional $k$-nearest-neighbour ($k$-NN) estimator. By establishing a sharp pathwise deterministic sandwiching framework for the data-driven random bandwidth, we successfully decouple the local infinite-dimensional small-ball profile from the polynomial covariance decay of the neighborhood indicators. Pointwise convergence rates are derived across short-range, critical, and long-range spatial regimes, revealing a combined penalty term that reflects both covariate spatial interaction and response error memory. Furthermore, uniform consistency over compact subsets is established for unbounded sub-Gaussian error processes through metric entropy and indicator boundary shell chaining. Structured polynomial simulations confirm our theoretical rates and exemplify the precise mechanics of the spatial long-range bottleneck.

With the advance of measurement technologies and increasing computing power, large spatial data with heterogeneous structures are often collected over high-dimensional domains. Existing Gaussian process (GP) models and computational strategies are often inadequate for analyzing such datasets in multi-dimensional domains. To address these challenges, we develop a Bayesian residual tree GP methodology called ResTGP for large spatial data with potentially heterogeneous structures in multi-dimensional domains. The key idea is to decompose a Gaussian process at a cascade of resolutions along a dyadic tree through iteratively computing predictive and residual processes so that the residual process on each tree node, both interior and leaf, becomes sufficient for the finer-level dependency within that node. This allows characterization of the underlying covariance structure in a flexible, multi-scale manner while achieving divide-and-conquer on the data domain, which leads to computational efficiency. To allow efficient tree inference, we introduce a computational strategy for Bayesian inference based on recursive message passing, which scales linearly with the sample size given the tree. This paper also proves posterior consistency of the model for estimating continuous functions in a nonparametric regression framework. Extensive numerical examples and the storm surge application confirm the advantages of the proposed method.