Axel Munk

Klaus Frick, Philipp Marnitz, Axel Munk

In this paper we are concerned with fully automatic and locally adaptive estimation of functions in a "signal + noise"-model where the regression function may additionally be blurred by a linear operator, e.g. by a convolution. To this end, we introduce a general class of statistical multiresolution estimators and develop an algorithmic framework for computing those. By this we mean estimators that are defined as solutions of convex optimization problems with supremum-type constraints. We employ a combination of the alternating direction method of multipliers with Dykstra's algorithm for computing orthogonal projections onto intersections of convex sets and prove numerical convergence. The capability of the proposed method is illustrated by various examples from imaging and signal detection.

Markus Haltmeier, Axel Munk

Denoising by frame thresholding is one of the most basic and efficient methods for recovering a discrete signal or image from data that are corrupted by additive Gaussian white noise. The basic idea is to select a frame of analyzing elements that separates the data in few large coefficients due to the signal and many small coefficients mainly due to the noise ε_n. Removing all data coefficients being in magnitude below a certain threshold yields a reconstruction of the original signal. In order to properly balance the amount of noise to be removed and the relevant signal features to be kept, a precise understanding of the statistical properties of thresholding is important. For that purpose we derive the asymptotic distribution of max_{ω\in Ω_n} |<ϕ_ω^n,ε_n>| for a wide class of redundant frames (ϕ_ω^n: ω\in Ω_n}. Based on our theoretical results we give a rationale for universal extreme value thresholding techniques yielding asymptotically sharp confidence regions and smoothness estimates corresponding to prescribed significance levels. The results cover many frames used in imaging and signal recovery applications, such as redundant wavelet systems, curvelet frames, or unions of bases. We show that `generically' a standard Gumbel law results as it is known from the case of orthonormal wavelet bases. However, for specific highly redundant frames other limiting laws may occur. We indeed verify that the translation invariant wavelet transform shows a different asymptotic behaviour.

Alexandre Mösching, Housen Li, Axel Munk

Hidden Markov models (HMMs) are characterized by an unobservable Markov chain and an observable process -- a noisy version of the hidden chain. Decoding the original signal from the noisy observations is one of the main goals in nearly all HMM based data analyses. Existing decoding algorithms such as Viterbi and the pointwise maximum a posteriori (PMAP) algorithm have computational complexity at best linear in the length of the observed sequence, and sub-quadratic in the size of the state space of the hidden chain. We present Quick Adaptive Ternary Segmentation (QATS), a divide-and-conquer procedure with computational complexity polylogarithmic in the length of the sequence, and cubic in the size of the state space, hence particularly suited for large scale HMMs with relatively few states. It also suggests an effective way of data storage as specific cumulative sums. In essence, the estimated sequence of states sequentially maximizes local likelihood scores among all local paths with at most three segments, and is meanwhile admissible. The maximization is performed only approximately using an adaptive search procedure. Our simulations demonstrate the speedups offered by QATS in comparison to Viterbi and PMAP, along with a precision analysis. An implementation of QATS is in the R-package QATS on GitHub.

Solt Kovács, Housen Li, Lorenz Haubner et al.

Change point estimation is often formulated as a search for the maximum of a gain function describing improved fits when segmenting the data. Searching through all candidates requires $O(n)$ evaluations of the gain function for an interval with $n$ observations. If each evaluation is computationally demanding (e.g. in high-dimensional models), this can become infeasible. Instead, we propose optimistic search methods with $O(\log n)$ evaluations exploiting specific structure of the gain function. Towards solid understanding of our strategy, we investigate in detail the $p$-dimensional Gaussian changing means setup, including high-dimensional scenarios. For some of our proposals, we prove asymptotic minimax optimality for detecting change points and derive their asymptotic localization rate. These rates (up to a possible log factor) are optimal for the univariate and multivariate scenarios, and are by far the fastest in the literature under the weakest possible detection condition on the signal-to-noise ratio in the high-dimensional scenario. Computationally, our proposed methodology has the worst case complexity of $O(np)$, which can be improved to be sublinear in $n$ if some a-priori knowledge on the length of the shortest segment is available. Our search strategies generalize far beyond the theoretically analyzed setup. We illustrate, as an example, massive computational speedup in change point detection for high-dimensional Gaussian graphical models.

Katharina Proksch, Frank Werner, Axel Munk

In this paper we propose a multiscale scanning method to determine active components of a quantity $f$ w.r.t. a dictionary $\mathcal{U}$ from observations $Y$ in an inverse regression model $Y=Tf+ξ$ with linear operator $T$ and general random error $ξ$. To this end, we provide uniform confidence statements for the coefficients $\langle φ, f\rangle$, $φ\in \mathcal U$, under the assumption that $(T^*)^{-1} \left(\mathcal U\right)$ is of wavelet-type. Based on this we obtain a multiple test that allows to identify the active components of $\mathcal{U}$, i.e. $\left\langle f, φ\right\rangle \neq 0$, $φ\in \mathcal U$, at controlled, family-wise error rate. Our results rely on a Gaussian approximation of the underlying multiscale statistic with a novel scale penalty adapted to the ill-posedness of the problem. The scale penalty furthermore ensures weak convergence of the statistic's distribution towards a Gumbel limit under reasonable assumptions. The important special cases of tomography and deconvolution are discussed in detail. Further, the regression case, when $T = \text{id}$ and the dictionary consists of moving windows of various sizes (scales), is included, generalizing previous results for this setting. We show that our method obeys an oracle optimality, i.e. it attains the same asymptotic power as a single-scale testing procedure at the correct scale. Simulations support our theory and we illustrate the potential of the method as an inferential tool for imaging. As a particular application we discuss super-resolution microscopy and analyze experimental STED data to locate single DNA origami.

Klaus Frick, Philipp Marnitz, Axel Munk

In this paper we present a spatially-adaptive method for image reconstruction that is based on the concept of statistical multiresolution estimation as introduced in [Frick K, Marnitz P, and Munk A. "Statistical multiresolution Dantzig estimation in imaging: Fundamental concepts and algorithmic framework". Electron. J. Stat., 6:231-268, 2012]. It constitutes a variational regularization technique that uses an supremum-type distance measure as data-fidelity combined with a convex cost functional. The resulting convex optimization problem is approached by a combination of an inexact alternating direction method of multipliers and Dykstra's projection algorithm. We describe a novel method for balancing data-fit and regularity that is fully automatic and allows for a sound statistical interpretation. The performance of our estimation approach is studied for various problems in imaging. Among others, this includes deconvolution problems that arise in Poisson nanoscale fluorescence microscopy.