Nonasymptotic rates for manifold, tangent space and curvature estimation

Abstract

Given a noisy sample from a submanifold $M\subset\mathbb{R}^{D}$, we derive optimal rates for the estimation of tangent spaces $T_{X}M$, the second fundamental form $\mathit{II}_{X}^{M}$ and the submanifold $M$. After motivating their study, we introduce a quantitative class of $\mathcal{C}^{k}$-submanifolds in analogy with Hölder classes. The proposed estimators are based on local polynomials and allow to deal simultaneously with the three problems at stake. Minimax lower bounds are derived using a conditional version of Assouad’s lemma when the base point $X$ is random.