Covariances and spectral density functions play a fundamental role in the theory of time series. There is a well-developed asymptotic theory for their estimates for low-dimensional stationary processes. For high-dimensional nonstationary processes, however, many important problems on their asymptotic behaviors are still unanswered. This paper presents a systematic asymptotic theory for the estimates of time-varying second-order statistics for a general class of…
We study the problem of change point localization in dynamic networks models. We assume that we observe a sequence of independent adjacency matrices of the same size, each corresponding to a realization of an unknown inhomogeneous Bernoulli model. The underlying distribution of the adjacency matrices are piecewise constant, and may change over a subset of the time points, called change points. We are concerned with recovering the unknown number and positions of the change…
Human learners have the natural ability to use knowledge gained in one setting for learning in a different but related setting. This ability to transfer knowledge from one task to another is essential for effective learning. In this paper, we study transfer learning in the context of nonparametric classification based on observations from different distributions under the posterior drift model, which is a general framework and arises in many practical problems. We first…
We study local complexity measures for stochastic convex optimization problems, providing a local minimax theory analogous to that of Hájek and Le Cam for classical statistical problems. We give complementary optimality results, developing fully online methods that adaptively achieve optimal convergence guarantees. Our results provide function-specific lower bounds and convergence results that make precise a correspondence between statistical difficulty and the geometric…
We observe $n$ independent random variables with joint distribution ${\mathbf{P}}$ and pretend that they are i.i.d. with some common density $s$ (with respect to a known measure $\mu $) that we wish to estimate. We consider a density model $\overline{S}$ for $s$ that we endow with a prior distribution $\pi $ (with support in $\overline{S}$) and build a robust alternative to the classical Bayes posterior distribution which possesses similar concentration properties around $s$…
In this paper, we study minimax and adaptation rates in general isotonic regression. For uniform deterministic and random designs in $[0,1]^{d}$ with ${d\ge2}$ and $N(0,1)$ noise, the minimax rate for the $\ell_{2}$ risk is known to be bounded from below by $n^{-1/d}$ when the unknown mean function $f$ is nondecreasing and its range is bounded by a constant, while the least squares estimator (LSE) is known to nearly achieve the minimax rate up to a factor $(\log n)^{\gamma}$…
The Bonferroni adjustment, or the union bound, is commonly used to study rate optimality properties of statistical methods in high-dimensional problems. However, in practice, the Bonferroni adjustment is overly conservative. The extreme value theory has been proven to provide more accurate multiplicity adjustments in a number of settings, but only on an ad hoc basis. Recently, Gaussian approximation has been used to justify bootstrap adjustments in large scale simultaneous…
Adel Javanmard · Marco Mondelli · Andrea Montanari·刊期 2020-12-01 · 卷 48(6)·The Annals of Statistics已编入正刊
通过位移凸性分析两层神经网络AI 解读
Fitting a function by using linear combinations of a large number $N$ of “simple” components is one of the most fruitful ideas in statistical learning. This idea lies at the core of a variety of methods, from two-layer neural networks to kernel regression, to boosting. In general, the resulting risk minimization problem is nonconvex and is solved by gradient descent or its variants. Unfortunately, little is known about global convergence properties of these approaches. Here,…
Consider the heteroscedastic nonparametric regression model with random design \begin{equation*}Y_{i}=f(X_{i})+V^{1/2}(X_{i})\varepsilon _{i},\quad i=1,2,\ldots ,n,\end{equation*} with $f(\cdot )$ and $V(\cdot )$ $\alpha $- and $\beta $-Hölder smooth, respectively. We show that the minimax rate of estimating $V(\cdot )$ under both local and global squared risks is of the order \begin{equation*}n^{-\frac{8\alpha \beta }{4\alpha \beta +2\alpha +\beta }}\vee n^{-\frac{2\beta }{2\beta +1}},\end{equation*}…
The paper introduces a new test for testing structures of covariances for high dimensional vectors and the data dimension can be much larger than the sample size. Under proper normalization, central and noncentral limit theorems are established. The asymptotic theory is attained without imposing any explicit restriction between data dimension and sample size. To facilitate the related statistical inference, we propose the balanced Rademacher weighted differencing scheme,…
We consider problems in model selection caused by the geometry of models close to their points of intersection. In some cases—including common classes of causal or graphical models, as well as time series models—distinct models may nevertheless have identical tangent spaces. This has two immediate consequences: first, in order to obtain constant power to reject one model in favour of another we need local alternative hypotheses that decrease to the null at a slower rate than…
While traditional multiple testing procedures prohibit adaptive analysis choices made by users, Goeman and Solari (Statist. Sci. 26 (2011) 584–597) proposed a simultaneous inference framework that allows users such flexibility while preserving high-probability bounds on the false discovery proportion (FDP) of the chosen set. In this paper, we propose a new class of such simultaneous FDP bounds, tailored for nested sequences of rejection sets. While most existing simultaneous…
Yi He · Yanxi Hou · Liang Peng · Haipeng Shen·刊期 2020-12-01 · 卷 48(6)·The Annals of Statistics已编入正刊
预测回归中条件风险价值的统计推断AI 解读
Conditional value-at-risk is a popular risk measure in risk management. We study the inference problem of conditional value-at-risk under a linear predictive regression model. We derive the asymptotic distribution of the least squares estimator for the conditional value-at-risk. Our results relax the model assumptions made in (Oper. Res. 60 (2012) 739–756) and correct their mistake in the asymptotic variance expression. We show that the asymptotic variance depends on the…
Ilmun Kim · Sivaraman Balakrishnan · Larry Wasserman·刊期 2020-12-01 · 卷 48(6)·The Annals of Statistics已编入正刊
通过投影平均构造稳健的多元非参数检验AI 解读
In this work, we generalize the Cramér–von Mises statistic via projection averaging to obtain a robust test for the multivariate two-sample problem. The proposed test is consistent against all fixed alternatives, robust to heavy-tailed data and minimax rate optimal against a certain class of alternatives. Our test statistic is completely free of tuning parameters and is computationally efficient even in high dimensions. When the dimension tends to infinity, the proposed test…
Dominic Edelmann · Donald Richards · Daniel Vogel·刊期 2020-12-01 · 卷 48(6)·The Annals of Statistics已编入正刊
距离标准差AI 解读
The distance standard deviation, which arises in distance correlation analysis of multivariate data, is studied as a measure of spread. The asymptotic distribution of the empirical distance standard deviation is derived under the assumption of finite second moments. Applications are provided to hypothesis testing on a data set from materials science and to multivariate statistical quality control. The distance standard deviation is compared to classical scale measures for…
Changbo Zhu · Xianyang Zhang · Shun Yao · Xiaofeng Shao·刊期 2020-12-01 · 卷 48(6)·The Annals of Statistics已编入正刊
高维情形下基于距离与再生核希尔伯特空间的依赖度量AI 解读
In this paper, we study distance covariance, Hilbert–Schmidt covariance (aka Hilbert–Schmidt independence criterion [In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (2008) 585–592]) and related independence tests under the high dimensional scenario. We show that the sample distance/Hilbert–Schmidt covariance between two random vectors can be approximated by the sum of squared componentwise sample cross-covariances up to an asymptotically constant factor, which indicates…
We consider $N$ independent stochastic processes $(X_{i}(t),t\in [0,T])$, $i=1,\ldots ,N$, defined by a one-dimensional stochastic differential equation, which are continuously observed throughout a time interval $[0,T]$ where $T$ is fixed. We study nonparametric estimation of the drift function on a given subset $A$ of ${\mathbb{R}}$. Projection estimators are defined on finite dimensional subsets of ${\mathbb{L}}^{2}(A,dx)$. We stress that the set $A$ may be compact or not…
We propose a method to infer the presence and location of change-points in the distribution of a sequence of independent data taking values in a general metric space, where change-points are viewed as locations at which the distribution of the data sequence changes abruptly in terms of either its Fréchet mean, Fréchet variance or both. The proposed method is based on comparisons of Fréchet variances before and after putative change-point locations and does not require a…
Yanjun Han · Jiantao Jiao · Tsachy Weissman · Yihong Wu·刊期 2020-12-01 · 卷 48(6)·The Annals of Statistics已编入正刊
Lipschitz 球上熵估计的最优收敛速度AI 解读
We consider the problem of minimax estimation of the entropy of a density over Lipschitz balls. Dropping the usual assumption that the density is bounded away from zero, we obtain the minimax rates $(n\ln n)^{-s/(s+d)}+n^{-1/2}$ for $0
Cheng Mao · Ashwin Pananjady · Martin J. Wainwright·刊期 2020-12-01 · 卷 48(6)·The Annals of Statistics已编入正刊
未知排列下双变量保序矩阵的最优估计探索AI 解读
Many applications, including rank aggregation, crowd-labeling and graphon estimation, can be modeled in terms of a bivariate isotonic matrix with unknown permutations acting on its rows and/or columns. We consider the problem of estimating an unknown matrix in this class, based on noisy observations of (possibly, a subset of) its entries. We design and analyze polynomial-time algorithms that improve upon the state of the art in two distinct metrics, showing, in particular,…
Raaz Dwivedi · Nhat Ho · Koulik Khamaru · Martin J. Wainwright · Michael I. Jordan 等 6 位作者·刊期 2020-12-01 · 卷 48(6)·The Annals of Statistics已编入正刊
奇异性、模型误设与EM算法的收敛速度AI 解读
A line of recent work has analyzed the behavior of the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm in the well-specified setting, in which the population likelihood is locally strongly concave around its maximizing argument. Examples include suitably separated Gaussian mixture models and mixtures of linear regressions. We consider over-specified settings in which the number of fitted components is larger than the number of components in the true distribution. Such mis-specified…
This paper studies the joint limiting behavior of extreme eigenvalues and trace of large sample covariance matrix in a generalized spiked population model, where the asymptotic regime is such that the dimension and sample size grow proportionally. The form of the joint limiting distribution is applied to conduct Johnson–Graybill-type tests, a family of approaches testing for signals in a statistical model. For this, higher order correction is further made, helping alleviate…
We propose an empirical Bayes method for high-dimensional linear regression models. Following an oracle approach that quantifies the error locally for each possible value of the parameter, we show that an empirical Bayes posterior contracts at the optimal rate at all parameters and leads to uniform size-optimal credible balls with guaranteed coverage under an “excessive bias restriction” condition. This condition gives rise to a new slicing of the entire space that is…
We study limit distributions for the tuning-free max–min block estimator originally proposed in (Fokianos, Leucht and Neumann (2017)) in the problem of multiple isotonic regression, under both fixed lattice design and random design settings. We show that, if the regression function $f_{0}$ admits vanishing derivatives up to order $\alpha_{k}$ along the $k$th dimension ($k=1,\ldots,d$) at a fixed point $x_{0}\in(0,1)^{d}$, and the errors have variance $\sigma^{2}$, then the…
We observe n independent random variables with joint distribution P and pretend that they are i.i.d. with some common density s (with respect to a known measure μ) that we wish to estimate. We consider a density model S for s that we endow with a prior distribution π (with support in S) and build a robust alternative to the classical Bayes posterior distribution which possesses similar concentration properties around s…
In this paper, we study minimax and adaptation rates in general isotonic regression. For uniform deterministic and random designs in [0,1]d with d≥2 and N(0,1) noise, the minimax rate for the ℓ2 risk is known to be bounded from below by n−1/d when the unknown mean function f is nondecreasing and its range is bounded by a constant, while the least squares estimator (LSE) is known to nearly achieve the minimax rate up to a factor (logn)γ…
Fitting a function by using linear combinations of a large number N of “simple” components is one of the most fruitful ideas in statistical learning. This idea lies at the core of a variety of methods, from two-layer neural networks to kernel regression, to boosting. In general, the resulting risk minimization problem is nonconvex and is solved by gradient descent or its variants. Unfortunately, little is known about global convergence properties of these approaches. Here,…
Consider the heteroscedastic nonparametric regression model with random design Yi=f(Xi)+V1/2(Xi)εi,i=1,2,…,n, with f(⋅) and V(⋅)α- and β-Hölder smooth, respectively. We show that the minimax rate of estimating V(⋅) under both local and global squared risks is of the order n−4αβ+2α+β8αβ∨n−2β+12β,…
We consider N independent stochastic processes (Xi(t),t∈[0,T]), i=1,…,N, defined by a one-dimensional stochastic differential equation, which are continuously observed throughout a time interval [0,T] where T is fixed. We study nonparametric estimation of the drift function on a given subset A of R. Projection estimators are defined on finite dimensional subsets of L2(A,dx). We stress that the set A may be compact or not…
We consider the problem of minimax estimation of the entropy of a density over Lipschitz balls. Dropping the usual assumption that the density is bounded away from zero, we obtain the minimax rates (nlnn)−s/(s+d)+n−1/2 for $0
We study limit distributions for the tuning-free max–min block estimator originally proposed in (Fokianos, Leucht and Neumann (2017)) in the problem of multiple isotonic regression, under both fixed lattice design and random design settings. We show that, if the regression function f0 admits vanishing derivatives up to order αk along the kth dimension (k=1,…,d) at a fixed point x0∈(0,1)d, and the errors have variance σ2, then the…