The paper investigates preference elicitation under the Bradley‑Terry‑Luce model, focusing on estimating an unknown partworth vector from pairwise queries that satisfy a joint identifiability condition. It derives minimax lower bounds and shows that the canonical maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) exists, is unique, and achieves near‑optimal error rates once the sample size exceeds a design‑dependent threshold, without requiring compactness constraints or external regularizers. The analysis decomposes the estimation error into a linear stochastic term, a second‑order bias, and a higher‑order remainder, providing a unified non‑asymptotic theory for parametric utility elicitation.
arXiv:2606. 30372v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantitative research across the social and behavioral sciences depends on human subject experiments that are expensive, slow, and subject to sampling bias.
arXiv:2608. 08662v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The single-selection prophet inequality is a canonical Bayesian online selection problem in which independent nonnegative values arrive sequentially and the decision-maker must irrevocably select at most one.
Minimax risk and regret are expectation-based criteria and do not capture rare but consequential failures. To address this concern, we develop a $δ$-explicit minimax-quantile theory for interactive statistical decision making (ISDM).
arXiv:2602. 16061v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Estimating population quantities such as mean outcomes from user feedback is fundamental to platform evaluation and social science, yet feedback is often missing not at random (MNAR): users with stronger opinions are more likely to respond, so standard estimators are biased and the estimand is not identified without additional assumptions.
arXiv:2607. 11920v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Evaluating decisions made under uncertainty is hard when labeled outcomes are scarce, costly, or confounded with luck.
arXiv:2606. 11171v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop indexed Bellman information complexity, a representation-level theory of interactive decision making centered on information indices and reference histories.
arXiv:2609. 20749v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Location estimation exhibits markedly different finite-sample behavior across noise distributions: regular families typically yield root-\(n\) rates, whereas compactly supported laws may admit faster, boundary-driven rates.
The paper studies contextual bilateral trade with full feedback, showing that action-independent observations eliminate the usual polynomial adaptation penalty seen in heavy-tailed bandits. It presents fully parameter-free algorithms that achieve oracle minimax regret rates without knowing the moment order or scale, and derives new regret bounds for both parametric and nonparametric settings. The key technical insight is a paired squared‑loss statistic whose noise cancels, enabling model selection and yielding regret rates that interpolate between classical nonparametric and linear extremes.
arXiv:2411.09686v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Regressing a function $F$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$ without incurring the statistical and computational curse of dimensionality requires exploitable struct...
The paper investigates regression when outcomes are observed only after passing through selection filters that depend on both covariates and outcomes, a common issue in fields such as clinical trials, labor markets, and auctions. It provides a complete characterization of the minimal assumptions on the functional forms of selection processes that allow regression to remain possible, and shows that the regression function can sometimes be identified even when the selection filter itself cannot. Under stronger identification conditions, the authors also deliver finite‑sample estimation guarantees, explicit convergence rates, and oracle‑efficient algorithms, offering the first general‑purpose estimation method for this broad class of selection problems.
arXiv:2607. 07468v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the recovery of sparse functions from finite, noisy, and indirect observations in the framework of statistical inverse learning.
arXiv:2607. 06570v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Value-of-information (VOI) analysis is usually conducted under a single probability measure.