Vol 26, No 4 (2017)

In this paper we consider the convolutionmodel Z = X + Y withX of unknown density f, independent of Y, when both random variables are nonnegative. Our goal is to estimate the unknown density f of X from n independent identically distributed observations of Z, when the law of the additive process Y is unknown. When the density of Y is known, a solution to the problem has been proposed in [17]. To make the problem identifiable for unknown density of Y, we assume that we have access to a preliminary sample of the nuisance process Y. The question is to propose a solution to an inverse problem with unknown operator. To that aim, we build a family of projection estimators of f on the Laguerre basis, well-suited for nonnegative random variables. The dimension of the projection space is chosen thanks to a model selection procedure by penalization. At last we prove that the final estimator satisfies an oracle inequality. It can be noted that the study of the mean integrated square risk is based on Bernstein’s type concentration inequalities developed for random matrices in [23].

We consider minimax signal detection in the sequence model. Working with certain ellipsoids in the space of square-summable sequences of real numbers, with a ball of positive radius removed, we obtain upper and lower bounds for the minimax separation radius in the non-asymptotic framework, i.e., for a fixed value of the involved noise level. We use very weak assumptions on the noise (i.e., fourth moments are assumed to be uniformly bounded). In particular, we do not use any kind of Gaussian distribution or independence assumption on the noise. It is shown that the established minimax separation rates are not faster than the ones obtained in the classical sequence model (i.e., independent standard Gaussian noise) but, surprisingly, are of the same order as the minimax estimation rates in the classical setting. Under an additional condition on the noise, the classical minimax separation rates are also retrieved in benchmark well-posed and ill-posed inverse problems.

In this paper, a weak version of the joint reversed hazard rate order, useful for stochastic comparison of non-independent random variables, has been defined and discussed. In particular, some relationships between the joint weak reversed hazard rate order and the usual reversed hazard rate order are established when the underlying copulas are symmetric.