Global rates of convergence in log-concave density estimation

Abstract

The estimation of a log-concave density on $\mathbb{R}^d$ represents a central problem in the area of nonparametric inference under shape constraints. In this paper, we study the performance of log-concave density estimators with respect to global loss functions, and adopt a minimax approach. We first show that no statistical procedure based on a sample of size $n$ can estimate a log-concave density with respect to the squared Hellinger loss function with supremum risk smaller than order $n^{-4/5}$, when $d=1$, and order $n^{-2/(d+1)}$ when $d \geq 2$. In particular, this reveals a sense in which, when $d \geq 3$, log-concave density estimation is fundamentally more challenging than the estimation of a density with two bounded derivatives (a problem to which it has been compared). Second, we show that for $d \leq 3$, the Hellinger $ε$-bracketing entropy of a class of log-concave densities with small mean and covariance matrix close to the identity grows like $\max\{ε^{-d/2},ε^{-(d-1)}\}$ (up to a logarithmic factor when $d=2$). This enables us to prove that when $d \leq 3$ the log-concave maximum likelihood estimator achieves the minimax optimal rate (up to logarithmic factors when $d = 2,3$) with respect to squared Hellinger loss.