Estimating distributions varying in time in a universal manner

Abstract

We investigate the estimation of distributions with time-varying parameters. We introduce an algorithm that achieves the optimal negative likelihood performance against the true probability distribution. We achieve this optimum regret performance without any knowledge about the total change of the parameters of true distribution. Our results are guaranteed to hold in an individual sequence manner such that we have no assumptions on the underlying sequences. Apart from the regret bounds, through synthetic and real life experiments, we demonstrate substantial performance gains with respect to the state-of-the-art probability density estimation algorithms in the literature.