Simultaneous estimation of multiple discrete unimodal distributions under stochastic order constraints

arXiv:2603.11532v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the problem of estimating multiple discrete unimodal distributions, motivated by search behavior analysis on a real-world platform. To incorporate prior knowledge of precedence relations among distributions, we impose stochastic order constraints and formulate the estimation task as a mixed-integer convex quadratic optimization problem. Experiments on both synthetic and real datasets show that the proposed method reduces the Jensen-Shannon divergence by 2.2% on average (up to 6.3%) when the sample size is small, while performing comparably to existing methods when sufficient data are available.

Source: arXiv cs.LG | 2026-08-06