Many theoretical results for lasso require the samples to be i.i.d. Recent work has provided guarantees for lasso assuming that the time series is generated by a sparse Vector Autoregressive (VAR) model with Gaussian innovations. Proofs of these results rely critically on the fact that the true data generating mechanism (DGM) is a finite-order Gaussian VAR. This assumption is quite brittle: linear transformations, including selecting a subset of variables, can lead to the…
Yun Yang · Debdeep Pati · Anirban Bhattacharya·刊期 2020-04-01 · 卷 48(2)·The Annals of Statistics已编入正刊
具有统计保证的 α 变分推断AI 解读
We provide statistical guarantees for a family of variational approximations to Bayesian posterior distributions, called $\alpha $-VB, which has close connections with variational approximations of tempered posteriors in the literature. The standard variational approximation is a special case of $\alpha $-VB with $\alpha =1$. When $\alpha \in (0,1]$, a novel class of variational inequalities are developed for linking the Bayes risk under the variational approximation to the…
Consider the problem of estimating average treatment effects when a large number of covariates are used to adjust for possible confounding through outcome regression and propensity score models. We develop new methods and theory to obtain not only doubly robust point estimators for average treatment effects, which remain consistent if either the propensity score model or the outcome regression model is correctly specified, but also model-assisted confidence intervals, which…
Estimation of the prediction error of a linear estimation rule is difficult if the data analyst also uses data to select a set of variables and constructs the estimation rule using only the selected variables. In this work, we propose an asymptotically unbiased estimator for the prediction error after model search. Under some additional mild assumptions, we show that our estimator converges to the true prediction error in $L^{2}$ at the rate of $O(n^{-1/2})$, with $n$ being…
Consider a sequence of real data points $X_{1},\ldots ,X_{n}$ with underlying means $\theta ^{*}_{1},\dots ,\theta ^{*}_{n}$. This paper starts from studying the setting that $\theta ^{*}_{i}$ is both piecewise constant and monotone as a function of the index $i$. For this, we establish the exact minimax rate of estimating such monotone functions, and thus give a nontrivial answer to an open problem in the shape-constrained analysis literature. The minimax rate under the…
Miles E. Lopes · Zhenhua Lin · Hans-Georg Müller·刊期 2020-04-01 · 卷 48(2)·The Annals of Statistics已编入正刊
高维最大值统计量的自助法:弱方差衰减下的近参数速率及应用AI 解读
In recent years, bootstrap methods have drawn attention for their ability to approximate the laws of “max statistics” in high-dimensional problems. A leading example of such a statistic is the coordinatewise maximum of a sample average of $n$ random vectors in $\mathbb{R}^{p}$. Existing results for this statistic show that the bootstrap can work when $n\ll p$, and rates of approximation (in Kolmogorov distance) have been obtained with only logarithmic dependence in $p$.…
Median-of-means (MOM) based procedures have been recently introduced in learning theory (Lugosi and Mendelson (2019); Lecué and Lerasle (2017)). These estimators outperform classical least-squares estimators when data are heavy-tailed and/or are corrupted. None of these procedures can be implemented, which is the major issue of current MOM procedures (Ann. Statist. 47 (2019) 783–794). In this paper, we introduce minmax MOM estimators and show that they achieve the same…
In this paper, we show that vector auto-regression (VAR) models, which are commonly used to estimate permanent price impact, are misspecified and can produce conflicting and incorrect inferences when the price impact function is nonlinear. We propose an alternative method to estimate permanent price impact by modifying a reinforcement learning (RL) framework. Our approach assumes the data is stationary and Markov, but is otherwise unrestrictive. We obtain empirical estimates…
In this article, we consider binary response models with linear quantile restrictions. Considerably generalizing previous research on this topic, our analysis focuses on an infinite collection of quantile estimators. We derive a uniform linearization for the properly standardized empirical quantile process and discover some surprising differences with the setting of continuously observed responses. Moreover, we show that considering quantile processes provides an effective…
Jing Lei · Kehui Chen · Brian Lynch·刊期 2020-03-01 · 卷 107(1)·Biometrika已编入正刊
多层网络数据中的一致社区检测AI 解读
Summary We consider multi-layer network data where the relationships between pairs of elements are reflected in multiple modalities, and may be described by multivariate or even high-dimensional vectors. Under the multi-layer stochastic block model framework we derive consistency results for a least squares estimation of memberships. Our theorems show that, as compared to single-layer community detection, a multi-layer network provides much richer information that allows for…
Summary Metagenomics sequencing is routinely applied to quantify bacterial abundances in microbiome studies, where bacterial composition is estimated based on the sequencing read counts. Due to limited sequencing depth and DNA dropouts, many rare bacterial taxa might not be captured in the final sequencing reads, which results in many zero counts. Naive composition estimation using count normalization leads to many zero proportions, which tend to result in inaccurate…
Summary Propensity scores are widely used with inverse probability weighting to estimate treatment effects in observational studies. We study calibrated estimation as an alternative to maximum likelihood estimation for fitting logistic propensity score models. We show that, with possible model misspecification, minimizing the expected calibration loss underlying the calibrated estimators involves reducing both the expected likelihood loss and a measure of relative errors…
Antik Chakraborty · Anirban Bhattacharya · Bani K Mallick·刊期 2020-03-01 · 卷 107(1)·Biometrika已编入正刊
同时实现降秩与变量选择的贝叶斯稀疏多响应回归AI 解读
Summary We develop a Bayesian methodology aimed at simultaneously estimating low-rank and row-sparse matrices in a high-dimensional multiple-response linear regression model. We consider a carefully devised shrinkage prior on the matrix of regression coefficients which obviates the need to specify a prior on the rank, and shrinks the regression matrix towards low-rank and row-sparse structures. We provide theoretical support to the proposed methodology by proving minimax…
Luheng Wang · Zhao Chen · Christina Dan Wang · Runze Li·刊期 2020-03 · 卷 215(1)·Journal of Econometrics已编入正刊
基于重拟合交叉验证的超高维精度矩阵估计AI 解读
This paper develops a new estimation procedure for ultrahigh dimensional sparse precision matrix, the inverse of covariance matrix. Regularization methods have been proposed for sparse precision matrix estimation, but they may not perform well with ultrahigh dimensional data due to the spurious correlation. We propose a refitted cross validation (RCV) method for sparse precision matrix estimation based on its Cholesky decomposition, which does not require the Gaussian…
Summary We introduce a random-perturbation-based rank estimator of the number of factors of a large-dimensional approximate factor model. An expansion of the rank estimator demonstrates that the random perturbation reduces the biases due to the persistence of the factor series and the dependence between the factor and error series. A central limit theorem for the rank estimator with convergence rate higher than root $n$ gives a new hypothesis-testing procedure for both…
Summary The paper provides statistical theory and intuition for personalized PageRank (called ‘PPR’): a popular technique that samples a small community from a massive network. We study a setting where the entire network is expensive to obtain thoroughly or to maintain, but we can start from a seed node of interest and ‘crawl’ the network to find other nodes through their connections. By crawling the graph in a designed way, the PPR vector can be approximated without…
Summary We propose a general new method, the conditional permutation test, for testing the conditional independence of variables X and Y given a potentially high dimensional random vector Z that may contain confounding factors. The test permutes entries of X non-uniformly, to respect the existing dependence between X and Z and thus to account for the presence of these confounders. Like the conditional randomization test of Candès and co-workers in 2018, our test relies on…
Niansheng Tang · Xiaodong Yan · Xingqiu Zhao·刊期 2020-02-01 · 卷 48(1)·The Annals of Statistics已编入正刊
删失数据下估计方程数量增长的惩罚广义经验似然AI 解读
This article considers simultaneous variable selection and parameter estimation as well as hypothesis testing in censored survival models where a parametric likelihood is not available. For the problem, we utilize certain growing dimensional general estimating equations and propose a penalized generalized empirical likelihood, where the general estimating equations are constructed based on the semiparametric efficiency bound of estimation with given moment conditions. The…
In multiple change-point analysis, one of the major challenges is to estimate the number of change-points. Most existing approaches attempt to minimize a Schwarz information criterion which balances a term quantifying model fit with a penalization term accounting for model complexity that increases with the number of change-points and limits overfitting. However, different penalization terms are required to adapt to different contexts of multiple change-point problems and…
Lai and Robbins (Adv. in Appl. Math. 6 (1985) 4–22) and Lai (Ann. Statist. 15 (1987) 1091–1114) provided efficient parametric solutions to the multi-armed bandit problem, showing that arm allocation via upper confidence bounds (UCB) achieves minimum regret. These bounds are constructed from the Kullback–Leibler information of the reward distributions, estimated from specified parametric families. In recent years, there has been renewed interest in the multi-armed bandit…
We present a novel binary convex reformulation of the sparse regression problem that constitutes a new duality perspective. We devise a new cutting plane method and provide evidence that it can solve to provable optimality the sparse regression problem for sample sizes $n$ and number of regressors $p$ in the 100,000s, that is, two orders of magnitude better than the current state of the art, in seconds. The ability to solve the problem for very high dimensions allows us to…
Xi Chen · Jason D. Lee · Xin T. Tong · Yichen Zhang·刊期 2020-02-01 · 卷 48(1)·The Annals of Statistics已编入正刊
随机梯度下降中模型参数的统计推断AI 解读
The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm has been widely used in statistical estimation for large-scale data due to its computational and memory efficiency. While most existing works focus on the convergence of the objective function or the error of the obtained solution, we investigate the problem of statistical inference of true model parameters based on SGD when the population loss function is strongly convex and satisfies certain smoothness conditions. Our main…
We consider the problem of estimating a consensus community structure by combining information from multiple layers of a multi-layer network using methods based on the spectral clustering or a low-rank matrix factorization. As a general theme, these “intermediate fusion” methods involve obtaining a low column rank matrix by optimizing an objective function and then using the columns of the matrix for clustering. However, the theoretical properties of these methods remain…
Adityanand Guntuboyina · Donovan Lieu · Sabyasachi Chatterjee · Bodhisattva Sen·刊期 2020-02-01 · 卷 48(1)·The Annals of Statistics已编入正刊
一元全变差去噪与趋势滤波的自适应风险界AI 解读
We study trend filtering, a relatively recent method for univariate nonparametric regression. For a given integer $r\geq1$, the $r$th order trend filtering estimator is defined as the minimizer of the sum of squared errors when we constrain (or penalize) the sum of the absolute $r$th order discrete derivatives of the fitted function at the design points. For $r=1$, the estimator reduces to total variation regularization which has received much attention in the statistics and…
Lasso guarantees for β-mixing heavy-tailed time series
α-variational inference with statistical guarantees
We provide statistical guarantees for a family of variational approximations to Bayesian posterior distributions, called α-VB, which has close connections with variational approximations of tempered posteriors in the literature. The standard variational approximation is a special case of α-VB with α=1. When α∈(0,1], a novel class of variational inequalities are developed for linking the Bayes risk under the variational approximation to the…
Estimation of the prediction error of a linear estimation rule is difficult if the data analyst also uses data to select a set of variables and constructs the estimation rule using only the selected variables. In this work, we propose an asymptotically unbiased estimator for the prediction error after model search. Under some additional mild assumptions, we show that our estimator converges to the true prediction error in L2 at the rate of O(n−1/2), with n being…
Consider a sequence of real data points X1,…,Xn with underlying means θ1∗,…,θn∗. This paper starts from studying the setting that θi∗ is both piecewise constant and monotone as a function of the index i. For this, we establish the exact minimax rate of estimating such monotone functions, and thus give a nontrivial answer to an open problem in the shape-constrained analysis literature. The minimax rate under the…
In recent years, bootstrap methods have drawn attention for their ability to approximate the laws of “max statistics” in high-dimensional problems. A leading example of such a statistic is the coordinatewise maximum of a sample average of n random vectors in Rp. Existing results for this statistic show that the bootstrap can work when n≪p, and rates of approximation (in Kolmogorov distance) have been obtained with only logarithmic dependence in p.…
Summary We introduce a random-perturbation-based rank estimator of the number of factors of a large-dimensional approximate factor model. An expansion of the rank estimator demonstrates that the random perturbation reduces the biases due to the persistence of the factor series and the dependence between the factor and error series. A central limit theorem for the rank estimator with convergence rate higher than root n gives a new hypothesis-testing procedure for both…
We present a novel binary convex reformulation of the sparse regression problem that constitutes a new duality perspective. We devise a new cutting plane method and provide evidence that it can solve to provable optimality the sparse regression problem for sample sizes n and number of regressors p in the 100,000s, that is, two orders of magnitude better than the current state of the art, in seconds. The ability to solve the problem for very high dimensions allows us to…
We study trend filtering, a relatively recent method for univariate nonparametric regression. For a given integer r≥1, the rth order trend filtering estimator is defined as the minimizer of the sum of squared errors when we constrain (or penalize) the sum of the absolute rth order discrete derivatives of the fitted function at the design points. For r=1, the estimator reduces to total variation regularization which has received much attention in the statistics and…