Near-optimal estimation of the unseen under regularly varying tail populations

Given n samples from a population of individuals belonging to different species, what is the number U of hitherto unseen species that would be observed if λn new samples were collected? This is the celebrated unseen-species problem, which has been the subject of recent breakthrough studies introducing non-parametric estimators of U that are minimax near-optimal and consistent all the way up to λ ≍ log n. These works do not rely on assumptions on the underlying unknown distribution p of the population, and therefore, while providing a theory in its greatest generality, worst-case distributions may hamper the estimation of U in concrete settings. In this paper, we strengthen the non-parametric framework for estimating U, making use of suitable assumptions on p. Inspired by the estimation of rare probabilities in extreme value theory, and motivated by the ubiquitous power-law type distributions in many natural and social phenomena, we make use of a semi-parametric assumption of regular variation of index α ∈(0,1) for the tail behaviour of p. Under this assumption, we introduce an estimator of U that is simple, linear in the sampling information, computationally efficient, and scalable to massive datasets. Then, uniformly over our class of regularly varying tail distributions, we show that the proposed estimator has provable guarantees: i) it is minimax near-optimal, up to a power of log n factor; ii) it is consistent all of the way up to log λ ≍ n^α/2/^√log n, and this range is the best possible. This is the first study on the estimation of the unseen under regularly varying tail distributions p. Our results rely on a novel approach, of independent interest, which combines the renowned method of the two fuzzy hypotheses for minimax estimation of discrete functionals, with Bayesian arguments under Poisson-Kingman priors for p. An illustration of our method is presented for synthetic and real data.