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José Blanchet

Publications and source records attributed to José Blanchet.

2 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Epsilon-Minimax Solutions of Statistical Decision Problems

A decision rule is epsilon-minimax if it is minimax up to an additive factor epsilon. We present an algorithm for provably obtaining epsilon-minimax solutions for a class of statistical decision problems. In particular, we are interested in problems where the statistician chooses randomly among I decision rules. The minimax solution of these problems admits a convex programming representation over the (I-1)-simplex. Our suggested algorithm is a well-known mirror subgradient descent routine, designed to approximately solve the convex optimization problem that defines the minimax decision rule. This iterative routine is known in the computer science literature as the hedge algorithm and is used in algorithmic game theory as a practical tool to find approximate solutions of two-person zero-sum games. We apply the suggested algorithm to different minimax problems in the econometrics literature. An empirical application to the problem of optimally selecting sites to maximize the external validity of an experimental policy evaluation illustrates the usefulness of the suggested procedure.

econ.EM↗
arXiv2025

Approximate Least-Favorable Distributions and Nearly Optimal Tests via Stochastic Mirror Descent

We consider a class of hypothesis testing problems where the null hypothesis postulates $M$ distributions for the observed data, and there is only one possible distribution under the alternative. We show that one can use a stochastic mirror descent routine for convex optimization to provably obtain - after finitely many iterations - both an approximate least-favorable distribution and a nearly optimal test, in a sense we make precise. Our theoretical results yield concrete recommendations about the algorithm's implementation, including its initial condition, its step size, and the number of iterations. Importantly, our suggested algorithm can be viewed as a slight variation of the algorithm suggested by Elliott, Müller, and Watson (2015), whose theoretical performance guarantees are unknown.

econ.EM↗