Histogram selection for possibly censored data

We propose in this article a unified approach to functional estimation problems based on possibly censored data. The general framework that we define allows, for instance, to handle density and hazard rate estimation based on randomly right-censored data, or regression. Given a collection of histograms, our estimation procedure consists in selecting the best histogram among that collection from the data, by minimizing a penalized least-squares type criterion. For a general collection of histograms, we obtain nonasymptotic oracle-type inequalities. Then, we consider the collection of histograms built on partitions into dyadic intervals, a choice inspired by an approximation result due to DeVore and Yu. In that case, our estimator is also adaptive in the minimax sense over a wide range of smoothness classes that contain functions of inhomogeneous smoothness. Besides, its computational complexity is only linear in the size of the sample.