We discuss the difficulties of estimating quadratic functionals based on observations Y (t) from the white noise model Y (t) where Y (t) is a standard Wiener process on Y (t) . The optimal rates of convergence (as Y (t) ) for estimating quadratic functionals under certain geometric constraints are found. Specifically, the optimal rates of estimating Y (t) under hyperrectangular constraints Y (t) and weighted Y (t) -body constraints Y (t) are computed explicitly, where Y (t) is the Y (t) th Fourier-Bessel coefficient of the unknown function Y (t) . We develop lower bounds based on testing two highly composite hypercubes and address their advantages. The attainable lower bounds are found by applying the hardest one-dimensional approach as well as the hypercube method. We demonstrate that for estimating regular quadratic functionals [ie, the functionals which can be estimated

We propose several modifications to the grid based particle method (GBPM) [21] for moving interface modeling. There are several nice features of the proposed algorithm. The new method can significantly improve the distribution of sampling particles on the evolving interface. Unlike the original GBPM where footpoints (sampling points) tend to cluster to each other, the sampling points in the new method tend to be better separated on the interface. Moreover, by replacing the grid-based discretization using the cell-based discretization, we naturally decompose the interface into segments so that we can easily approximate surface integrals. As a possible alternative to the local polynomial least square approximation, we also study a geometric basis for local reconstruction in the resampling step. We will show that such modification can simplify the overall implementations. Numerical examples in two- and three

We develop an expectation-maximization algorithm with local adaptivity for image segmentation and classification. The key idea of our approach is to combine global statistics extracted from the Gaussian mixture model or other proper statistical models with local statistics and geometrical information, such as local probability distribution, orientation, and anisotropy. The combined information is used to design an adaptive local classification strategy that improves the robustness of the algorithm and also keeps fine features in the image. The proposed methodology is flexible and can be easily generalized to deal with other inferred information/quantities and statistical methods/models.

We provide a new insight of the difficulty of nonparametric estimation of a whole function. A new method is invented for finding a minimax lower bound of globally estimating a function. The idea is to adjust automatically the direction to the nearly hardest I-dimensional subproblem at each location, and to use locally the difficulty of I-dimensional subproblem. In a variety of contexts, our method can give not only attainable global rates, but also constant factors. Comparing with the existing techniques, our method has the advantages of being easily implemented and understood, and can give constant factors as well.

We propose a semiparametric latent Gaussian copula model for modelling mixed multivariate data, which contain a combination of both continuous and binary variables. The model assumes that the observed binary variables are obtained by dichotomizing latent variables that satisfy the Gaussian copula distribution. The goal is to infer the conditional independence relationship between the latent random variables, based on the observed mixed data. Our work has two main contributions: we propose a unified rankbased approach to estimate the correlation matrix of latent variables; we establish the concentration inequality of the proposed rankbased estimator. Consequently, our methods achieve the same rates of convergence for precision matrix estimation and graph recovery, as if the latent variables were observed. The methods proposed are numerically assessed through extensive simulation studies, and real