Adaptive estimation of Sobolev-type energy functionals on the sphere

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Durastanti, Claudio
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Durastanti, Claudio
author_facet Durastanti, Claudio
contents We study the estimation of quadratic Sobolev-type integral functionals of an unknown density on the unit sphere. The functional is defined through fractional powers of the Laplace--Beltrami operator and provides a global measure of smoothness and spectral energy. Our approach relies on spherical needlet frames, which yield a localized multiscale decomposition while preserving tight frame properties in the natural square-integrable function space on the sphere. We construct unbiased estimators of suitably truncated versions of the functional and derive sharp oracle risk bounds through an explicit bias--variance analysis. When the smoothness of the density is unknown, we propose a Lepski-type data-driven selection of the resolution level. The resulting adaptive estimator achieves minimax-optimal rates over Sobolev classes, without resorting to nonlinear or sparsity-based methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_04823
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Adaptive estimation of Sobolev-type energy functionals on the sphere
Durastanti, Claudio
Statistics Theory
62G05, 62G20, 42C40
We study the estimation of quadratic Sobolev-type integral functionals of an unknown density on the unit sphere. The functional is defined through fractional powers of the Laplace--Beltrami operator and provides a global measure of smoothness and spectral energy. Our approach relies on spherical needlet frames, which yield a localized multiscale decomposition while preserving tight frame properties in the natural square-integrable function space on the sphere. We construct unbiased estimators of suitably truncated versions of the functional and derive sharp oracle risk bounds through an explicit bias--variance analysis. When the smoothness of the density is unknown, we propose a Lepski-type data-driven selection of the resolution level. The resulting adaptive estimator achieves minimax-optimal rates over Sobolev classes, without resorting to nonlinear or sparsity-based methods.
title Adaptive estimation of Sobolev-type energy functionals on the sphere
topic Statistics Theory
62G05, 62G20, 42C40
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.04823