Empirical measures for incomplete data with applications

Abstract

Methods are proposed to construct empirical measures when there are missing terms among the components of a random vector. Furthermore, Vapnik-Chevonenkis type exponential bounds are obtained on the uniform deviations of these estimators, from the true probabilities. These results can then be used to deal with classical problems such as statistical classification, via empirical risk minimization, when there are missing covariates among the data. Another application involves the uniform estimation of a distribution function.