Bayesian analysis of data from the general linear mixed model is challenging because any nontrivial prior leads to an intractable posterior density. However, if a conditionally conjugate prior density is adopted, then there is a simple Gibbs sampler that can be employed to explore the posterior density. A popular default among the conditionally conjugate priors is an improper prior that takes a product form with a flat prior on the regression parameter, and so-called power…
This paper provides conditions under which subsampling and the bootstrap can be used to construct estimators of the quantiles of the distribution of a root that behave well uniformly over a large class of distributions $\mathbf{P}$. These results are then applied (i) to construct confidence regions that behave well uniformly over $\mathbf{P}$ in the sense that the coverage probability tends to at least the nominal level uniformly over $\mathbf{P}$ and (ii) to construct tests…
We consider the estimation of the slope function in functional linear regression, where scalar responses are modeled in dependence of random functions. Cardot and Johannes [J. Multivariate Anal. 101 (2010) 395–408] have shown that a thresholded projection estimator can attain up to a constant minimax-rates of convergence in a general framework which allows us to cover the prediction problem with respect to the mean squared prediction error as well as the estimation of the…
The paper aims at reconsidering the famous Le Cam LAN theory. The main features of the approach which make it different from the classical one are as follows: (1) the study is nonasymptotic, that is, the sample size is fixed and does not tend to infinity; (2) the parametric assumption is possibly misspecified and the underlying data distribution can lie beyond the given parametric family. These two features enable to bridge the gap between parametric and nonparametric theory…
This paper considers estimation of sparse covariance matrices and establishes the optimal rate of convergence under a range of matrix operator norm and Bregman divergence losses. A major focus is on the derivation of a rate sharp minimax lower bound. The problem exhibits new features that are significantly different from those that occur in the conventional nonparametric function estimation problems. Standard techniques fail to yield good results, and new tools are thus…
Let $(Y_{k})_{k\in\mathbb{Z}}$ be a stationary sequence on a probability space $(\Omega,\mathcal{A},\mathbb{P})$ taking values in a standard Borel space $\mathsf{Y}$. Consider the associated maximum likelihood estimator with respect to a parametrized family of hidden Markov models such that the law of the observations $(Y_{k})_{k\in\mathbb{Z}}$ is not assumed to be described by any of the hidden Markov models of this family. In this paper we investigate the consistency of…
We address the issue of variable selection in the regression model with very high ambient dimension, that is, when the number of variables is very large. The main focus is on the situation where the number of relevant variables, called intrinsic dimension, is much smaller than the ambient dimension $d$. Without assuming any parametric form of the underlying regression function, we get tight conditions making it possible to consistently estimate the set of relevant variables.…
Motivated by recent work studying massive imaging data in the neuroimaging literature, we propose multivariate varying coefficient models (MVCM) for modeling the relation between multiple functional responses and a set of covariates. We develop several statistical inference procedures for MVCM and systematically study their theoretical properties. We first establish the weak convergence of the local linear estimate of coefficient functions, as well as its asymptotic bias and…
We study the properties of false discovery rate (FDR) thresholding, viewed as a classification procedure. The “$0$”-class (null) is assumed to have a known density while the “$1$”-class (alternative) is obtained from the “$0$”-class either by translation or by scaling. Furthermore, the “$1$”-class is assumed to have a small number of elements w.r.t. the “$0$”-class (sparsity). We focus on densities of the Subbotin family, including Gaussian and Laplace models. Nonasymptotic…
Soumendra N. Lahiri · Subhadeep Mukhopadhyay·刊期 2012-10-01 · 卷 40(5)·The Annals of Statistics已编入正刊
高维惩罚经验似然方法AI 解读
This paper formulates a penalized empirical likelihood (PEL) method for inference on the population mean when the dimension of the observations may grow faster than the sample size. Asymptotic distributions of the PEL ratio statistic is derived under different component-wise dependence structures of the observations, namely, (i) non-Ergodic, (ii) long-range dependence and (iii) short-range dependence. It follows that the limit distribution of the proposed PEL ratio statistic…
Florentina Bunea · Yiyuan She · Marten H. Wegkamp·刊期 2012-10-01 · 卷 40(5)·The Annals of Statistics已编入正刊
高维矩阵简约估计中的变量与秩联合选择AI 解读
We propose dimension reduction methods for sparse, high-dimensional multivariate response regression models. Both the number of responses and that of the predictors may exceed the sample size. Sometimes viewed as complementary, predictor selection and rank reduction are the most popular strategies for obtaining lower-dimensional approximations of the parameter matrix in such models. We show in this article that important gains in prediction accuracy can be obtained by…
We consider the sampling problem for functional PCA (fPCA), where the simplest example is the case of taking time samples of the underlying functional components. More generally, we model the sampling operation as a continuous linear map from $\mathcal{H}$ to $\mathbb{R}^{m}$, where the functional components to lie in some Hilbert subspace $\mathcal{H} $ of $L^{2}$, such as a reproducing kernel Hilbert space of smooth functions. This model includes time and frequency…
Alekh Agarwal · Sahand Negahban · Martin J. Wainwright·刊期 2012-10-01 · 卷 40(5)·The Annals of Statistics已编入正刊
高维统计恢复中梯度方法的快速全局收敛AI 解读
Many statistical $M$-estimators are based on convex optimization problems formed by the combination of a data-dependent loss function with a norm-based regularizer. We analyze the convergence rates of projected gradient and composite gradient methods for solving such problems, working within a high-dimensional framework that allows the ambient dimension $d$ to grow with (and possibly exceed) the sample size $n$. Our theory identifies conditions under which projected gradient…
Winston Wei Dou · David Pollard · Harrison H. Zhou·刊期 2012-10-01 · 卷 40(5)·The Annals of Statistics已编入正刊
一般指数族函数型回归的估计AI 解读
This paper studies a class of exponential family models whose canonical parameters are specified as linear functionals of an unknown infinite-dimensional slope function. The optimal minimax rates of convergence for slope function estimation are established. The estimators that achieve the optimal rates are constructed by constrained maximum likelihood estimation with parameters whose dimension grows with sample size. A change-of-measure argument, inspired by Le Cam’s theory…
In this paper, we study nonparametric models allowing for locally stationary regressors and a regression function that changes smoothly over time. These models are a natural extension of time series models with time-varying coefficients. We introduce a kernel-based method to estimate the time-varying regression function and provide asymptotic theory for our estimates. Moreover, we show that the main conditions of the theory are satisfied for a large class of nonlinear…
A sparse precision matrix can be directly translated into a sparse Gaussian graphical model under the assumption that the data follow a joint normal distribution. This neat property makes high-dimensional precision matrix estimation very appealing in many applications. However, in practice we often face nonnormal data, and variable transformation is often used to achieve normality. In this paper we consider the nonparanormal model that assumes that the variables follow a…
We consider the problem of combining a (possibly uncountably infinite) set of affine estimators in nonparametric regression model with heteroscedastic Gaussian noise. Focusing on the exponentially weighted aggregate, we prove a PAC-Bayesian type inequality that leads to sharp oracle inequalities in discrete but also in continuous settings. The framework is general enough to cover the combinations of various procedures such as least square regression, kernel ridge regression,…
This paper considers the problem of clustering a collection of unlabeled data points assumed to lie near a union of lower-dimensional planes. As is common in computer vision or unsupervised learning applications, we do not know in advance how many subspaces there are nor do we have any information about their dimensions. We develop a novel geometric analysis of an algorithm named sparse subspace clustering (SSC) [In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition,…
We show that one can perform causal inference in a natural way for continuous-time scenarios using tools from stochastic analysis. This provides new alternatives to the positivity condition for inverse probability weighting. The probability distribution that would govern the frequency of observations in the counterfactual scenario can be characterized in terms of a so-called martingale problem. The counterfactual and factual probability distributions may be related through a…
Han Liu · Fang Han · Ming Yuan · John Lafferty · Larry Wasserman·刊期 2012-08-01 · 卷 40(4)·The Annals of Statistics已编入正刊
高维半参数高斯 Copula 图模型AI 解读
We propose a semiparametric approach called the nonparanormal SKEPTIC for efficiently and robustly estimating high-dimensional undirected graphical models. To achieve modeling flexibility, we consider the nonparanormal graphical models proposed by Liu, Lafferty and Wasserman [J. Mach. Learn. Res. 10 (2009) 2295–2328]. To achieve estimation robustness, we exploit nonparametric rank-based correlation coefficient estimators, including Spearman’s rho and Kendall’s tau. We prove…
Community detection is a fundamental problem in network analysis, with applications in many diverse areas. The stochastic block model is a common tool for model-based community detection, and asymptotic tools for checking consistency of community detection under the block model have been recently developed. However, the block model is limited by its assumption that all nodes within a community are stochastically equivalent, and provides a poor fit to networks with hubs or…
A parameter estimation problem is considered, in which dispersed sensors transmit to the statistician partial information regarding their observations. The sensors observe the paths of continuous semimartingales, whose drifts are linear with respect to a common parameter. A novel estimating scheme is suggested, according to which each sensor transmits only one-bit messages at stopping times of its local filtration. The proposed estimator is shown to be consistent and, for a…
It is my pleasure to congratulate the authors for an innovative and inspiring piece of work.Chandrasekaran, Parrilo and Willsky (hereafter CPW) have come up with a novel approach, combining ideas from convex optimization and algebraic geometry, to the long-standing problem of Gaussian graphical model selection with latent variables.Their method is intuitive and simple to implement, based on solving a convex log-determinant program with suitable choices of regularization.In…
This paper provides conditions under which subsampling and the bootstrap can be used to construct estimators of the quantiles of the distribution of a root that behave well uniformly over a large class of distributions P. These results are then applied (i) to construct confidence regions that behave well uniformly over P in the sense that the coverage probability tends to at least the nominal level uniformly over P and (ii) to construct tests…
Let (Yk)k∈Z be a stationary sequence on a probability space (Ω,A,P) taking values in a standard Borel space Y. Consider the associated maximum likelihood estimator with respect to a parametrized family of hidden Markov models such that the law of the observations (Yk)k∈Z is not assumed to be described by any of the hidden Markov models of this family. In this paper we investigate the consistency of…
We address the issue of variable selection in the regression model with very high ambient dimension, that is, when the number of variables is very large. The main focus is on the situation where the number of relevant variables, called intrinsic dimension, is much smaller than the ambient dimension d. Without assuming any parametric form of the underlying regression function, we get tight conditions making it possible to consistently estimate the set of relevant variables.…
We study the properties of false discovery rate (FDR) thresholding, viewed as a classification procedure. The “0”-class (null) is assumed to have a known density while the “1”-class (alternative) is obtained from the “0”-class either by translation or by scaling. Furthermore, the “1”-class is assumed to have a small number of elements w.r.t. the “0”-class (sparsity). We focus on densities of the Subbotin family, including Gaussian and Laplace models. Nonasymptotic…
We consider the sampling problem for functional PCA (fPCA), where the simplest example is the case of taking time samples of the underlying functional components. More generally, we model the sampling operation as a continuous linear map from H to Rm, where the functional components to lie in some Hilbert subspace H of L2, such as a reproducing kernel Hilbert space of smooth functions. This model includes time and frequency…
Many statistical M-estimators are based on convex optimization problems formed by the combination of a data-dependent loss function with a norm-based regularizer. We analyze the convergence rates of projected gradient and composite gradient methods for solving such problems, working within a high-dimensional framework that allows the ambient dimension d to grow with (and possibly exceed) the sample size n. Our theory identifies conditions under which projected gradient…