Detection of sparse mixtures: higher criticism and scan statistic
Ery Arias-Castro, Andrew Ying · Electronic Journal of Statistics · 2019
We consider the problem of detecting a sparse mixture as studied by Ingster (1997) and Donoho and Jin (2004). We consider a wide array of base distributions. In particular, we study the situation when the base distribution has polynomial tails, a situation that has not received much attention in the literature. Perhaps surprisingly, we find that in the context of such a power-law distribution, the higher criticism does not achieve the detection boundary. However, the scan statistic does.