Density estimation from batched broken random samples

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Authors: Hancheng Bi, Bernhard Schmitzer, Thilo D. Stier
Cited by: 0

Abstract

The broken random sample problem was first introduced by DeGroot, Feder, and Gole (1971, Ann. Math. Statist.): in each observation (batch), a random sample of $M$ i.i.d. point pairs $ ((X_i,Y_i))_{i=1}^M$ is drawn from a joint distribution with density $p(x,y)$, but we can observe only the unordered multisets $(X_i)_{i=1}^M$ and $(Y_i)_{i=1}^M$ separately; that is, the pairing information is lost. For large $M$, inferring $p$ from a single observation has been shown to be essentially impossible. In this paper, we propose a parametric method based on a pseudo-log-likelihood to estimate $p$ from $N$ i.i.d. broken sample batches, and we prove a fast convergence rate in $N$ for our estimator that is uniform in $M$, under mild assumptions.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Statistical Methods and Inference Probability and Statistical Research Markov Chains and Monte Carlo Methods

Publication details

Journal / source
arXiv (Cornell University)
Publication date
10 February 2026
Language
EN
Document type
Preprint