{"paper":{"title":"The Broad Optimality of Profile Maximum Likelihood","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.LG","math.ST","stat.TH"],"primary_cat":"stat.ML","authors_text":"Alon Orlitsky, Yi Hao","submitted_at":"2019-06-10T04:59:45Z","abstract_excerpt":"We study three fundamental statistical-learning problems: distribution estimation, property estimation, and property testing. We establish the profile maximum likelihood (PML) estimator as the first unified sample-optimal approach to a wide range of learning tasks. In particular, for every alphabet size $k$ and desired accuracy $\\varepsilon$:\n  $\\textbf{Distribution estimation}$ Under $\\ell_1$ distance, PML yields optimal $\\Theta(k/(\\varepsilon^2\\log k))$ sample complexity for sorted-distribution estimation, and a PML-based estimator empirically outperforms the Good-Turing estimator on the act"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"1906.03794","kind":"arxiv","version":3},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}