Sparse Density Estimation with Measurement Errors

Abstract

This paper aims to estimate an unknown density of the data with measurement errors as a linear combination of functions from a dictionary. The main novelty is the proposal and investigation of the corrected sparse density estimator (CSDE). Inspired by the penalization approach, we propose the weighted Elastic-net penalized minimal ℓ2-distance method for sparse coefficients estimation, where the adaptive weights come from sharp concentration inequalities. The first-order conditions holding a high probability obtain the optimal weighted tuning parameters. Under local coherence or minimal eigenvalue assumptions, non-asymptotic oracle inequalities are derived. These theoretical results are transposed to obtain the support recovery with a high probability. Some numerical experiments for discrete and continuous distributions confirm the significant improvement obtained by our procedure when compared with other conventional approaches. Finally, the application is performed in a meteorology dataset. It shows that our method has potency and superiority in detecting multi-mode density shapes compared with other conventional approaches.

Keywords

• density estimation
• Elastic-net
• measurement errors
• support recovery
• multi-mode data