Nonparametric Regression for Random Unbiased Perturbations
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| author | Lyubarskaja, Anna Rothenhäusler, Dominik |
| author_facet | Lyubarskaja, Anna Rothenhäusler, Dominik |
| contents | We study nonparametric regression with covariates $X$ and outcome $Y$ under random unbiased perturbations (RUPs) of the conditional distribution $Y|X$, where the marginal distribution of covariates, $P^X$, remains fixed but the conditional law, $P^{Y|X}$, varies randomly across datasets. Unlike adversarial distribution shift frameworks that yield conservative worst-case guarantees, RUPs induce dataset-level variance inflation rather than systematic bias. We provide examples of RUPs and show that this distributional uncertainty reduces the effective sample size to $n_{\mathrm{eff}} = n/(1 + n τ)$, where $τ\in [0,1]$ quantifies the perturbation strength. For local polynomial estimators, we derive an extended bias-variance decomposition that includes a distributional variance term with the same bandwidth scaling as classical sampling variance. This leads to a modified bandwidth selection principle: when distributional uncertainty dominates sampling uncertainty ($τ\gg 1/n$), optimal bandwidths scale as $τ^{1/(2β+1)}$ rather than the usual $n^{-1/(2β+1)}$, where $β$ indicates the smoothness of the function class considered. We also establish matching minimax lower bounds showing that there exists an RUP for which this effective sample size $n_{\mathrm{eff}}$ is fundamental. Our results demonstrate that random dataset-level perturbations create a distinct mode of uncertainty that affects both practical tuning and fundamental statistical limits. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_20905 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Nonparametric Regression for Random Unbiased Perturbations Lyubarskaja, Anna Rothenhäusler, Dominik Statistics Theory 62G08, 62G35, 62C20 We study nonparametric regression with covariates $X$ and outcome $Y$ under random unbiased perturbations (RUPs) of the conditional distribution $Y|X$, where the marginal distribution of covariates, $P^X$, remains fixed but the conditional law, $P^{Y|X}$, varies randomly across datasets. Unlike adversarial distribution shift frameworks that yield conservative worst-case guarantees, RUPs induce dataset-level variance inflation rather than systematic bias. We provide examples of RUPs and show that this distributional uncertainty reduces the effective sample size to $n_{\mathrm{eff}} = n/(1 + n τ)$, where $τ\in [0,1]$ quantifies the perturbation strength. For local polynomial estimators, we derive an extended bias-variance decomposition that includes a distributional variance term with the same bandwidth scaling as classical sampling variance. This leads to a modified bandwidth selection principle: when distributional uncertainty dominates sampling uncertainty ($τ\gg 1/n$), optimal bandwidths scale as $τ^{1/(2β+1)}$ rather than the usual $n^{-1/(2β+1)}$, where $β$ indicates the smoothness of the function class considered. We also establish matching minimax lower bounds showing that there exists an RUP for which this effective sample size $n_{\mathrm{eff}}$ is fundamental. Our results demonstrate that random dataset-level perturbations create a distinct mode of uncertainty that affects both practical tuning and fundamental statistical limits. |
| title | Nonparametric Regression for Random Unbiased Perturbations |
| topic | Statistics Theory 62G08, 62G35, 62C20 |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20905 |