Density estimation using the perceptron

Abstract: We propose a new density estimation algorithm. Given $n$ i.i.d. observations from a distribution belonging to a class of densities on $\mathbb{R}^d$, our estimator outputs any density in the class whose "perceptron discrepancy" with the empirical distribution is at most $O(\sqrt{d / n})$. The perceptron discrepancy is defined as the largest difference in mass two distribution place on any halfspace. It is shown that this estimator achieves the expected total variation distance to the truth that is almost minimax optimal over the class of densities with bounded Sobolev norm and Gaussian mixtures. This suggests that the regularity of the prior distribution could be an explanation for the efficiency of the ubiquitous step in machine learning that replaces optimization over large function spaces with simpler parametric classes (such as discriminators of GANs). We also show that replacing the perceptron discrepancy with the generalized energy distance of Sz\'ekely and Rizzo (2013) further improves total variation loss. The generalized energy distance between empirical distributions is easily computable and differentiable, which makes it especially useful for fitting generative models. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first "simple" distance with such properties that yields minimax optimal statistical guarantees. In addition, we shed light on the ubiquitous method of representing discrete data in domain $[k]$ via embedding vectors on a unit ball in $\mathbb{R}^d$. We show that taking $d \asymp \log (k)$ allows one to use simple linear probing to evaluate and estimate total variation distance, as well as recovering minimax optimal sample complexity for the class of discrete distributions on $[k]$.