Mean estimation and regression under heavy-tailed distributions--a survey

Abstract

We survey some of the recent advances in mean estimation and regression function estimation. In particular, we describe sub-Gaussian mean estimators for possibly heavy-tailed data both in the univariate and multivariate settings. We focus on estimators based on median-of-means techniques but other methods such as the trimmed mean and Catoni's estimator are also reviewed. We give detailed proofs for the cornerstone results. We dedicate a section on statistical learning problems--in particular, regression function estimation--in the presence of possibly heavy-tailed data.