Optimal Detection For Sparse Mixtures∗

Detection of sparse signals arises in a wide range of modern scientific studies. The focus so far has been mainly on Gaussian mixture models. In this paper, we consider the detection problem under a general sparse mixture model and obtain an explicit expression for the detection boundary. It is shown that the fundamental limits of detection is governed by the behavior of the log-likelihood ratio evaluated at an appropriate quantile of the null distribution. We also establish the adaptive optimality of the higher criticism procedure across all sparse mixtures satisfying certain mild regularity conditions. In particular, the general results obtained in this paper recover and extend in a unified manner the previously known results on sparse detection far beyond the conventional Gaussian model and other exponential families