Low-Dose Tomography of Random Fields and the Problem of Continuous Heterogeneity

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Yun, Ho, Caponera, Alessia, Panaretos, Victor M.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911054417625088
author Yun, Ho
Caponera, Alessia
Panaretos, Victor M.
author_facet Yun, Ho
Caponera, Alessia
Panaretos, Victor M.
contents We consider the problem of nonparametric estimation of the conformational variability in a population of related structures, based on low-dose tomography of a random sample of representative individuals. In this context, each individual represents a random perturbation of a common template and is imaged noisily and discretely at but a few projection angles. Such problems arise in the cryo Electron Microscopy of structurally heterogeneous biological macromolecules. We model the population as a random field, whose mean captures the typical structure, and whose covariance reflects the heterogeneity. We show that consistent estimation is achievable with as few as two projections per individual, and derive uniform convergence rates reflecting how the various parameters of the problem affect statistical efficiency, and their trade-offs. Our analysis formulates the domain of the forward operator to be a reproducing kernel Hilbert space, where we establish representer and Mercer theorems tailored to question at hand. This allows us to exploit pooling estimation strategies central to functional data analysis, illustrating their versatility in a novel context. We provide an efficient computational implementation using tensorized Krylov methods and demonstrate the performance of our methodology by way of simulation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_10220
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Low-Dose Tomography of Random Fields and the Problem of Continuous Heterogeneity
Yun, Ho
Caponera, Alessia
Panaretos, Victor M.
Statistics Theory
62G08, 62R10 (Primary) 44A12, 65F10 (Secondary)
We consider the problem of nonparametric estimation of the conformational variability in a population of related structures, based on low-dose tomography of a random sample of representative individuals. In this context, each individual represents a random perturbation of a common template and is imaged noisily and discretely at but a few projection angles. Such problems arise in the cryo Electron Microscopy of structurally heterogeneous biological macromolecules. We model the population as a random field, whose mean captures the typical structure, and whose covariance reflects the heterogeneity. We show that consistent estimation is achievable with as few as two projections per individual, and derive uniform convergence rates reflecting how the various parameters of the problem affect statistical efficiency, and their trade-offs. Our analysis formulates the domain of the forward operator to be a reproducing kernel Hilbert space, where we establish representer and Mercer theorems tailored to question at hand. This allows us to exploit pooling estimation strategies central to functional data analysis, illustrating their versatility in a novel context. We provide an efficient computational implementation using tensorized Krylov methods and demonstrate the performance of our methodology by way of simulation.
title Low-Dose Tomography of Random Fields and the Problem of Continuous Heterogeneity
topic Statistics Theory
62G08, 62R10 (Primary) 44A12, 65F10 (Secondary)
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.10220