Canonical gradient 2026-10-07
The canonical gradient is the influence-function representer in the statistical tangent space . It equals the orthogonal projection onto of any representer. Every other representer differs from it by an element of , so the Pythagorean theorem in an inner-product space gives it minimum variance. For in an unrestricted density model with bounded , it is .
Efficient information 2026-10-07
The efficient information for a scalar target statistical parameter is the squared L2 norm of its efficient score. It cannot exceed the parametric Fisher information, by the Pythagorean theorem in an inner-product space. It can vanish when first-order target variation can be reproduced by nuisance variation.
For a pathwise differentiable statistical functional, an influence-function representer is a mean-zero function such that every admissible score function satisfies . The efficient influence function, also called the canonical gradient, is the unique such representer in the statistical tangent space. Equivalently, it is the orthogonal projection of any representer onto that statistical tangent space. The Pythagorean theorem in an inner-product space shows that it has the smallest squared L2 norm among all representers.
Here the statistical tangent space is all of . To verify the closure explicitly, take , truncate it to , and set . Then is bounded and centered, and in , by dominated convergence and the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality. Part (c) supplies a representer already in this space. Hence
Its variance is .
The closure must be taken in the density-weighted space . An unweighted reading of in the printed hint is false. For example, when , the function has and , so bounded centered truncations converge to it in ; nevertheless . This illustrates density of bounded centered scores and fixes the measure in the closure statement.
Because has full column rank, is invertible. The ordinary least squares estimator is
It satisfies the normal equations
so the residual is orthogonal to the column space of . For any ,
The two terms are orthogonal, and the Pythagorean theorem in an inner-product space gives
Thus minimizes the least-squares objective.
The nonzero orthogonal polynomials have distinct degrees and form an orthogonal basis of . Define
For each ,
Thus the residual is orthogonal to all of .
For any , write
The two terms are orthogonal, so the Pythagorean theorem in an inner-product space gives
Equality holds only for . This proves the formula and uniqueness of the least-squares polynomial in an orthogonal-polynomial basis.
Part (a) shows that is orthogonal to . Since
the Pythagorean theorem in an inner-product space immediately gives
This is the norm decomposition associated with orthogonal projection onto a finite-dimensional subspace.
Suppose first that is orthogonal to . Every can be written with . The Pythagorean theorem in an inner-product space gives
Thus is a best approximation.
Conversely, if minimizes the distance, then for every the quadratic
has its minimum at . Differentiating there gives in the real case; varying real and imaginary parts gives the complex case. Therefore
For any admissible , part (a) rewrites the constraints as
Hence is orthogonal to every and therefore to their span, which contains . The Pythagorean theorem in an inner-product space gives
Choose any -fold antiderivative of . The identity from part (a) and show that satisfies all prescribed divided differences, and equality holds in the norm bound. Therefore
characterizes the minimizers. They are unique up to addition of an arbitrary polynomial in , which changes neither the order- divided differences nor the th derivative.
Conditional expectation is the orthogonal projection from onto . The difference is orthogonal to every -measurable square-integrable variable, including . The Pythagorean theorem in an inner-product space applied to
gives the identity.
A real positive-semidefinite kernel is a symmetric function such that every finite Gram matrix is positive semidefinite. The representer theorem says that any minimizer in a Reproducing-kernel Hilbert space of an objective depending on only through and a strictly increasing function of lies in
Indeed, write relative to this span. The reproducing property gives for every , while the Pythagorean theorem in an inner-product space gives . Removing a nonzero perpendicular component preserves all data values and strictly decreases the penalty, proving the theorem.
Apply this decomposition to both optimizers and write and . If and are the two Gram matrices, then
Writing and , with pseudoinverses on the respective ranges, turns the supremum into