Adaptive estimation of the $\mathbb{L}_2$-norm of a probability density and related topics II. Upper bounds via the oracle approach

Abstract: This is the second part of the research project initiated in Cleanthous et al (2024). We deal with the problem of the adaptive estimation of the $\mathbb{L}_2$-norm of a probability density on $\mathbb{R}^d$, $d\geq 1$, from independent observations. The unknown density is assumed to be uniformly bounded by unknown constant and to belong to the union of balls in the isotropic/anisotropic Nikolskii's spaces. In Cleanthous et al (2024) we have proved that the optimally adaptive estimators do no exist in the considered problem and provided with several lower bounds for the adaptive risk. In this part we show that these bounds are tight and present the adaptive estimator which is obtained by a data-driven selection from a family of kernel-based estimators. The proposed estimation procedure as well as the computation of its risk are heavily based on new concentration inequalities for decoupled $U$-statistics of order two established in Section 4. It is also worth noting that all our results are derived from the unique oracle inequality which may be of independent interest.