Directed subspace angle 2026-10-07
For a nonzero closed subspace of a Hilbert space and a closed subspace of a Hilbert space , this angle measures the worst loss under projection from to . Its positive cosine is a uniform lower bound for . The order of the subspaces matters in general. This is distinct from the smallest angle between two subspaces, whose cosine is a supremum. For equal finite dimensions the cosine is the smallest singular value of the cross Gram matrix of orthonormal bases. When is zero, the infimum is over an empty unit sphere and does not define an angle in ; use a lower-bound formulation instead.
For independent-error regression with a zero-mean error, bounded density paths must preserve both normalization and the first moment. Their score functions therefore satisfy two constraints. When , truncation followed by two small bounded moment corrections shows these scores are dense in the displayed closed subspace of a Hilbert space. By independence, they are orthogonal to every with . The same constraints apply to other paths only under regularity permitting differentiation of the first moment.
Nuisance tangent space 2026-10-07
The nuisance tangent space is the closed linear span of score functions from statistical paths that vary the nuisance parameter while fixing the target statistical parameter. It is a closed subspace of a Hilbert space inside . Removing its component from a parametric score function leaves the information that nuisance variation cannot imitate.
Orthogonal direct sum 2026-10-07
An orthogonal direct sum is a direct sum whose distinct summands are mutually orthogonal. For and , the Pythagorean identity gives . In a Hilbert space, a closed subspace of a Hilbert space and its orthogonal complement give an orthogonal direct sum of the entire space. The component maps are orthogonal projections and have operator norm one when their ranges are nonzero.
Fix . Let be the nuisance tangent space: the closed linear span in of score functions of statistical paths that vary only the nuisance parameter . By the preceding argument, is contained in the mean-zero L2 space .
Let denote orthogonal projection onto this closed subspace of a Hilbert space. The efficient score and scalar efficient information are
The efficient score is the component of the parametric score function that cannot be reproduced by changing the nuisance parameter. The efficient information is its squared L2 norm; it can be zero, so positivity must not be assumed in the definition.
Interpret the angle as the directed subspace angle defined by the infimum of projected unit vectors; it is different from the smallest angle between two subspaces. Write
Consider the bounded linear operator given by . Its adjoint operator, between these two Hilbert spaces, is : for and , the orthogonal projections give . The two positive directed subspace angle cosines yield
The first bound makes injective and gives a closed range. Explicitly, if converges, then , so is a Cauchy sequence. The closed subspace of a Hilbert space is complete, and its limit maps to the proposed range limit. The second bound gives . A vector orthogonal to the range has , so it must be zero. The range is therefore dense as well as closed in , and is onto. This is the mechanism of invertibility from lower bounds on an operator and its adjoint.
For any , choose the unique with . Then , so . Moreover, if , then and hence . Every vector has a unique decomposition, and
The direct sum is a topological one as well: the component depends boundedly on , with operator norm at most .
For precision, the quoted equality of the norms of complementary oblique projections needs both summands nonzero. For example, with , and , the oblique projection is , so but . The secant function has value one here, so the second equality in the quoted formula fails. With nonzero complementary summands its intended version is valid. The proof above does not use that formula. The angle itself is undefined on a zero source space because it has no unit vectors; expressing the hypotheses as the two lower bounds handles zero spaces without ambiguity.