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Maximum likelihood estimation for the $λ$-exponential family

Published: May 6, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2505.03582v1

By: Xiwei Tian , Ting-Kam Leonard Wong , Jiaowen Yang and more

BigTech Affiliations: Meta

Potential Business Impact:

Helps computers learn from data more accurately.

Business Areas:
A/B Testing Data and Analytics

The $\lambda$-exponential family generalizes the standard exponential family via a generalized convex duality motivated by optimal transport. It is the constant-curvature analogue of the exponential family from the information-geometric point of view, but the development of computational methodologies is still in an early stage. In this paper, we propose a fixed point iteration for maximum likelihood estimation under i.i.d.~sampling, and prove using the duality that the likelihood is monotone along the iterations. We illustrate the algorithm with the $q$-Gaussian distribution and the Dirichlet perturbation.

Country of Origin
🇨🇦 🇺🇸 United States, Canada

Page Count
9 pages

Category
Mathematics:
Statistics Theory