Haar density estimator 2026-10-14
A Haar density estimator estimates the Haar scaling function coefficients by sample averages. It is exactly the histogram with cells of width . Its expectation is the Haar projection of the density. If the density has bounded derivative and is bounded by , its pointwise expected absolute error is at most : the first term is the Haar projection error for a Lipschitz function, and the second follows from the variance of a cell count and the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality. Choosing gives error while preserving nonnegativity and integral one.
Let be the scaling function and an orthonormal wavelet, with and . For , the wavelet series at a coarse level is
The series converges in the L2 norm. Its coarse part captures broad variation and successive wavelet levels add finer detail. Truncating at levels produces the orthogonal projection onto ; Parseval identity makes its squared approximation error the sum of the omitted squared coefficients. Merely square-integrable functions need not have pointwise convergence.
For the Haar wavelet, use the cell convention and let be the unique such interval containing . The Haar scaling functions are , so the Haar projection is
For a merely locally integrable function this cell-average formula remains defined, even if a global orthogonal projection is unavailable. If , the mean value theorem gives Lipschitz continuity and, since on the cell,
Thus the requested bound holds with , by the Haar projection error for a Lipschitz function.
To estimate a density, replace each scaling or wavelet coefficient or by the sample average of that basis function. The finite-resolution Haar density estimator is therefore
It is the histogram on the dyadic cells, is nonnegative, and integrates to one. Its expectation is . A density with bounded derivative is bounded: the Lipschitz density height bound gives by integrating the triangular lower envelope . The case cannot be a probability density on the whole real line. Hence .
The cell probability is . The sample count has a binomial distribution, so
The Cauchy-Schwarz inequality bounds the mean centered absolute deviation by the square root of this variance. Adding the projection bias gives
Choose , so . The two terms have the same order, and
This is a bias-variance tradeoff: refining the cells decreases the averaging bias but increases the sampling variance.
The Haar projection averages this normal distribution density on each cell; the finer cells follow its variation more closely. A Haar density estimator replaces these exact cell probabilities by empirical frequencies and therefore also introduces sampling noise.