Fréchet Mean Set Estimation in the Hausdorff Metric, via Relaxation

This work resolves the following question in non-Euclidean statistics: Is it possible to consistently estimate the Fr\'echet mean set of an unknown population distribution, with respect to the Hausdorff metric, when given access to independent identically-distributed samples? Our affirmative answer is based on a careful analysis of the ``relaxed empirical Fr\'echet mean set estimators'' which identify the set of near-minimizers of the empirical Fr\'echet functional and where the amount of ``relaxation'' vanishes as the number of data tends to infinity. Our main theoretical results include exact descriptions of which relaxation rates give weak consistency and which give strong consistency, as well as the construction of a ``two-step estimator'' which (assuming only the finiteness of certain moments and a mild condition on the metric entropy of the underlying metric space) adaptively finds the fastest possible relaxation rate for strongly consistent estimation. Our main practical result is simply that researchers working with non-Euclidean data in the real world can be better off computing relaxed empirical Fr\'echet mean sets rather than unrelaxed empirical Fr\'echet mean sets.