NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper
SD-KDE: Score-Debiased Kernel Density Estimation
- Elliot Epstein
- Rajat Vadiraj Dwaraknath
- Thanawat Sornwanee
- John Winnicki
- Jerry Liu
We propose a method for density estimation that leverages an estimated score function to debias kernel density estimation (SD-KDE). In our approach, each data point is adjusted by taking a single step along the score function with a specific choice of step size, followed by standard KDE with a modified bandwidth. The step size and modified bandwidth are chosen to remove the leading order bias in the KDE, improving the asymptotic convergence rate. Our experiments on synthetic tasks in 1D, 2D and on MNIST, demonstrate that our proposed SD-KDE method significantly reduces the mean integrated squared error compared to the standard Silverman KDE, even with noisy estimates in the score function. These results underscore the potential of integrating score-based corrections into nonparametric density estimation.