With ideal spatial adaptation, an oracle furnishes information about how best to adapt a spatially variable estimator, whether piecewise constant, piecewise polynomial, variable knot spline, or variable bandwidth kernel, to the unknown function. Estimation with the aid of an oracle o ers dramatic advantages over traditional linear estimation by nonadaptive kernels � however, it is a priori unclear whether such performance can be obtained by a procedure relying on the data alone. We describe a new principle for spatially-adaptive estimation: selective wavelet reconstruction. Weshowthatvariableknot spline ts and piecewise-polynomial ts, when equipped with an oracle to select the knots, are not dramatically more powerful than selective wavelet reconstruction with an oracle. We develop a practical spatially adaptive method, RiskShrink, which works by shrinkage of empirical wavelet coe cients. RiskShrink mimics the performance of an oracle for selective wavelet reconstruction as well as it is possible to do so. A new inequality inmultivariate normal decision theory which wecallthe oracle inequality shows that attained performance di ers from ideal performance by at most a factor 2logn, where n is the sample size. Moreover no estimator can give a better guarantee than this. Within the class of spatially adaptive procedures, RiskShrink is essentially optimal. Relying only on the data, it comes within a factor log 2 n of the performance of piecewise polynomial and variable-knot spline methods equipped with an oracle. In contrast, it is unknown how or if piecewise polynomial methods could be made to function this well when denied access to an oracle and forced to rely on data alone.

We attempt to recover a function of unknown smoothness from noisy, sampled data. We introduce a procedure, SureShrink, which suppresses noise by thresholding the empirical wavelet coefficients. The thresholding is adaptive: a threshold level is assigned to each dyadic resolution level by the principle of minimizing the Stein Unbiased Estimate of Risk (Sure) for threshold estimates. The computational effort of the overall procedure is order N log(N) as a function of the sample size N. SureShrink is smoothness-adaptive: if the unknown function contains jumps, the reconstruction (essentially) does also; if the unknown function has a smooth piece, the reconstruction is (essentially) as smooth as the mother wavelet will allow. The procedure is in a sense optimally smoothness-adaptive: it is near-minimax simultaneously over a whole interval of the Besov scale; the size of this interval depends on the choice of mother wavelet. We know from a previous paper by the authors that traditional smoothing methods -- kernels, splines, and orthogonal series estimates -- even with optimal choices of the smoothing parameter, would be unable to perform

Considerable e ort has been directed recently to develop asymptotically minimax methods in problems of recovering in nite-dimensional objects (curves, densities, spectral densities, images) from noisy data. A rich and complex body of work has evolved, with nearly- or exactly- minimax estimators being obtained for a variety of interesting problems. Unfortunately, the results have often not been translated into practice, for a variety of reasons { sometimes, similarity to known methods, sometimes, computational intractability, and sometimes, lack of spatial adaptivity. We discuss a method for curve estimation based on n noisy data; one translates the empirical wavelet coe cients towards the origin by an amount p p 2 log(n) = n. The method is di erent from methods in common use today, is computationally practical, and is spatially adaptive; thus it avoids a number of previous objections to minimax estimators. At the same time, the method is nearly minimax for a wide variety of loss functions { e.g. pointwise error, global error measured in L p norms, pointwise and global error in estimation of derivatives { and for a wide range of smoothness classes, including standard Holder classes, Sobolev classes, and Bounded Variation. This is amuch broader near-optimality than anything previously proposed in the minimax literature. Finally, the theory underlying the method is interesting, as it exploits a correspondence between statistical questions and questions of optimal recovery and information-based complexity.

Lepski's method is a method for choosing a "best" estimator (in an appropriate sense) among a family of those, under suitable restrictions on this family. The subject of this paper is to give a nonasymptotic presentation of Lepski's method in the context of Gaussian regression models for a collection of projection estimators on some nested family of finite-dimensional linear subspaces. It is also shown that a suitable tuning of the method allows to asymptotically recover the best possible risk in the family.