Modern Stochastics: Theory and Applications

Probabilistic properties of vantage point trees are studied. A vp-tree built from a sequence of independent identically distributed points in ${[-1,\hspace{0.1667em}1]^{d}}$ with the ${\ell _{\infty }}$-distance function is considered. The length of the leftmost path in the tree, as well as partitions over the space it produces are analyzed. The results include several convergence theorems regarding these characteristics, as the number of nodes in the tree tends to infinity.

In this study, we consider a bias reduction of the conditional maximum likelihood estimators for the unknown parameters of a Gaussian second-order moving average (MA(2)) model. In many cases, we use the maximum likelihood estimator because the estimator is consistent. However, when the sample size n is small, the error is large because it has a bias of $O({n^{-1}})$. Furthermore, the exact form of the maximum likelihood estimator for moving average models is slightly complicated even for Gaussian models. We sometimes rely on simpler maximum likelihood estimation methods. As one of the methods, we focus on the conditional maximum likelihood estimator and examine the bias of the conditional maximum likelihood estimator for a Gaussian MA(2) model. Moreover, we propose new estimators for the unknown parameters of the Gaussian MA(2) model based on the bias of the conditional maximum likelihood estimators. By performing simulations, we investigate properties of this bias, as well as the asymptotic variance of the conditional maximum likelihood estimators for the unknown parameters. Finally, we confirm the validity of the new estimators through this simulation study.

Sufficient conditions are given for the existence of a unique bounded in the mean solution to a second-order difference equation with jumps of operator coefficients in a Banach space. The question of the proximity of this solution to the stationary solution of the corresponding difference equation with constant operator coefficients is studied.

A complex-valued linear mixture model is considered for discrete weakly stationary processes. Latent components of interest are recovered, which underwent a linear mixing. Asymptotic properties are studied of a classical unmixing estimator which is based on simultaneous diagonalization of the covariance matrix and an autocovariance matrix with lag τ. The main contributions are asymptotic results that can be applied to a large class of processes. In related literature, the processes are typically assumed to have weak correlations. This class is extended, and the unmixing estimator is considered under stronger dependency structures. In particular, the asymptotic behavior of the unmixing estimator is estimated for both long- and short-range dependent complex-valued processes. Consequently, this theory covers unmixing estimators that converge slower than the usual $\sqrt{T}$ and unmixing estimators that produce non-Gaussian asymptotic distributions. The presented methodology is a powerful preprocessing tool and highly applicable in several fields of statistics.

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a classical technique of dimension reduction for multivariate data. When the data are a mixture of subjects from different subpopulations one can be interested in PCA of some (or each) subpopulation separately. In this paper estimators are considered for PC directions and corresponding eigenvectors of subpopulations in the nonparametric model of mixture with varying concentrations. Consistency and asymptotic normality of obtained estimators are proved. These results allow one to construct confidence sets for the PC model parameters. Performance of such confidence intervals for the leading eigenvalues is investigated via simulations.