On Permutation Invariant Problems in Large-Scale Inference

Simultaneous statistical inference problems are at the basis of almost any scientific discovery process. We consider a class of simultaneous inference problems that are invariant under permutations, meaning that all components of the problem are oblivious to the labelling of the multiple instances under consideration. For any such problem we identify the optimal solution which is itself permutation invariant, the most natural condition one could impose on the set of candidate solutions. Interpreted differently, for any possible value of the parameter we find a tight (non-asymptotic) lower bound on the statistical performance of any procedure that obeys the aforementioned condition. By generalizing the standard decision theoretic notions of permutation invariance, we show that the results apply to a myriad of popular problems in simultaneous inference, so that the ultimate benchmark for each of these problems is identified. The connection to the nonparametric empirical Bayes approach of Robbins is discussed in the context of asymptotic attainability of the bound uniformly in the parameter value.