Optimal Rates for Nonparametric Density Estimation under Communication Constraints

Jayadev Acharya, Clement Louis Canonne, Aditya Vikram Singh, Himanshu Tyagi

Keywords: density estimation, communication constraints, nonparametric inference, distributed algorithms

TL;DR: We prove (nearly) optimal minimax bounds for nonparametric density estimation under communication (bandwidth) constraints.

Abstract: We consider density estimation for Besov spaces when the estimator is restricted to use only a limited number of bits about each sample. We provide a noninteractive adaptive estimator which exploits the sparsity of wavelet bases, along with a simulate-and-infer technique from parametric estimation under communication constraints. We show that our estimator is nearly rate-optimal by deriving minmax lower bounds that hold even when interactive protocols are allowed. Interestingly, while our wavelet-based estimator is almost rate-optimal for Sobolev spaces as well, it is unclear whether the standard Fourier basis, which arise naturally for those spaces, can be used to achieve the same performance.

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