Context Tree Selection: A Unifying View

The present paper investigates non-asymptotic properties of two popular procedures of context tree (or Variable Length Markov Chains) estimation: Rissanen's algorithm Context and the Penalized Maximum Likelihood criterion. First showing how they are related, we prove finite horizon bounds for the probability of over- and under-estimation. Concerning overestimation, no boundedness or loss-of-memory conditions are required: the proof relies on new deviation inequalities for empirical probabilities of independent interest. The underestimation properties rely on loss-of-memory and separation conditions of the process. These results improve and generalize the bounds obtained previously. Context tree models have been introduced by Rissanen as a parsimonious generalization of Markov models. Since then, they have been widely used in applied probability and statistics

Functional Sequential Treatment Allocation

Consider a setting in which a policy maker assigns subjects to treatments, observing each outcome before the next subject arrives. Initially, it is unknown which treatment is best, but the sequential nature of the problem permits learning about the effectiveness of the treatments. While the multi-armed-bandit literature has shed much light on the situation when the policy maker compares the effectiveness of the treatments through their mean, much less is known about other targets. This is restrictive, because a cautious decision maker may prefer to target a robust location measure such as a quantile or a trimmed mean. Furthermore, socio-economic decision making often requires targeting purpose specific characteristics of the outcome distribution, such as its inherent degree of inequality, welfare or poverty. In the present paper we introduce and study sequential learning algorithms when the distributional characteristic of interest is a general functional of the outcome distribution. Minimax expected regret optimality results are obtained within the subclass of explore-then-commit policies, and for the unrestricted class of all policies

Context tree selection: A unifying view

Context tree models have been introduced by Rissanen in [25] as a parsimonious generalization of Markov models. Since then, they have been widely used in applied probability and statistics. The present paper investigates non-asymptotic properties of two popular procedures of context tree estimation: Rissanenâs algorithm Context and penalized maximum likelihood. First showing how they are related, we prove finite horizon bounds for the probability of over- and under-estimation. Concerning over-estimation, no boundedness or loss-of-memory conditions are required: the proof relies on new deviation inequalities for empirical probabilities of independent interest. The under-estimation properties rely on classical hypotheses for processes of infinite memory. These results improve on and generalize the bounds obtained in Duarte et al. (2006) [12], Galves et al. (2008) [18], Galves and Leonardi (2008) [17], Leonardi (2010) [22], refining asymptotic results of Böhlmann and Wyner (1999) [4] and Csiszár and Talata (2006) [9].Algorithm Context Penalized maximum likelihood Model selection Variable length Markov chains Bayesian information criterion Deviation inequalities

Pseudo-regenerative block-bootstrap for hidden Markov chains

International audienc

Bregman superquantiles. Estimation methods and applications

In thiswork,we extend some parameters built on a probability distribution introduced before to the casewhere the proximity between real numbers is measured by using a Bregman divergence. This leads to the definition of the Bregman superquantile (thatwe can connect with severalworks in economy, see for example [18] or [9]). Axioms of a coherent measure of risk discussed previously (see [31] or [3]) are studied in the case of Bregman superquantile. Furthermore,we deal with asymptotic properties of aMonte Carlo estimator of the Bregman superquantile. Several numerical tests confirm the theoretical results and an application illustrates the potential interests of the Bregman superquantile