Moment ideals of local Dirac mixtures

In this paper we study ideals arising from moments of local Dirac measures and their mixtures. We provide generators for the case of first order local Diracs and explain how to obtain the moment ideal of the Pareto distribution from them. We then use elimination theory and Prony's method for parameter estimation of finite mixtures. Our results are showcased with applications in signal processing and statistics. We highlight the natural connections to algebraic statistics, combinatorics and applications in analysis throughout the paper.Comment: 26 pages, 3 figure

Algebraic Methods for the Estimation of Statistical Distributions

This thesis deals with the problem of estimating statistical distributions from data. In the first part, the method of moments is used in combination with computational algebraic techniques in order to estimate parameters coming from local Dirac mixtures and their convolutions. The second part focuses on the nonparametric setting, in particular on combinatorial and algebraic aspects of the estimation of log-concave distributions