Tuning-free one-bit covariance estimation using data-driven dithering

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Dirksen, Sjoerd, Maly, Johannes
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911755537481728
author Dirksen, Sjoerd
Maly, Johannes
author_facet Dirksen, Sjoerd
Maly, Johannes
contents We consider covariance estimation of any subgaussian distribution from finitely many i.i.d. samples that are quantized to one bit of information per entry. Recent work has shown that a reliable estimator can be constructed if uniformly distributed dithers on $[-λ,λ]$ are used in the one-bit quantizer. This estimator enjoys near-minimax optimal, non-asymptotic error estimates in the operator and Frobenius norms if $λ$ is chosen proportional to the largest variance of the distribution. However, this quantity is not known a-priori, and in practice $λ$ needs to be carefully tuned to achieve good performance. In this work we resolve this problem by introducing a tuning-free variant of this estimator, which replaces $λ$ by a data-driven quantity. We prove that this estimator satisfies the same non-asymptotic error estimates - up to small (logarithmic) losses and a slightly worse probability estimate. We also show that by using refined data-driven dithers that vary per entry of each sample, one can construct an estimator satisfying the same estimation error bound as the sample covariance of the samples before quantization -- again up logarithmic losses. Our proofs rely on a new version of the Burkholder-Rosenthal inequalities for matrix martingales, which is expected to be of independent interest.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2307_12613
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Tuning-free one-bit covariance estimation using data-driven dithering
Dirksen, Sjoerd
Maly, Johannes
Statistics Theory
Information Theory
We consider covariance estimation of any subgaussian distribution from finitely many i.i.d. samples that are quantized to one bit of information per entry. Recent work has shown that a reliable estimator can be constructed if uniformly distributed dithers on $[-λ,λ]$ are used in the one-bit quantizer. This estimator enjoys near-minimax optimal, non-asymptotic error estimates in the operator and Frobenius norms if $λ$ is chosen proportional to the largest variance of the distribution. However, this quantity is not known a-priori, and in practice $λ$ needs to be carefully tuned to achieve good performance. In this work we resolve this problem by introducing a tuning-free variant of this estimator, which replaces $λ$ by a data-driven quantity. We prove that this estimator satisfies the same non-asymptotic error estimates - up to small (logarithmic) losses and a slightly worse probability estimate. We also show that by using refined data-driven dithers that vary per entry of each sample, one can construct an estimator satisfying the same estimation error bound as the sample covariance of the samples before quantization -- again up logarithmic losses. Our proofs rely on a new version of the Burkholder-Rosenthal inequalities for matrix martingales, which is expected to be of independent interest.
title Tuning-free one-bit covariance estimation using data-driven dithering
topic Statistics Theory
Information Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.12613