This paper proposes an asymptotically distribution-free test for copulas with dynamic marginal distributions, such as GARCH and ARMA processes. The test is based on the empirical copula process with parametrically estimated marginal distributions. By applying the Khmaladze (1982, 1988, 1993) martingale transformation method, the transformed empirical process converges to a standard Gaussian process, so the resulting test statistics are asymptotically distribution-free. Monte…
Mean square forecast error loss implies a bias–variance trade-off that suggests that structural breaks of small magnitude should be ignored. In this paper, we provide a test to determine whether modeling a structural break improves forecast accuracy. The test is near optimal even when the date of a local-to-zero break is not consistently estimable. The results extend to forecast combinations that weight the post-break sample and the full sample forecasts by our test…
We study inference for the local innovations of Itô semimartingales. Specifically, we construct a resampling procedure for the empirical CDF of high-frequency innovations that have been standardized using a nonparametric estimate of its stochastic scale (volatility) and truncated to rid the effect of “large” jumps. Our locally dependent wild bootstrap (LDWB) accommodate issues related to the stochastic scale and jumps as well as account for a special block-wise dependence…
Models with multiway fixed effects are frequently used to address selection on unobservables. The data used for estimating these models often contain few observations per value of either indexing variable (sparsely matched data). I show that this sparsity has important implications for inference and propose an asymptotically valid inference method based on subsetting. Sparsity also has important implications for point estimation when covariates or instrumental variables are…
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 Randomization is a basis for the statistical inference of treatment effects without strong assumptions on the outcome-generating process. Appropriately using covariates further yields more precise estimators in randomized experiments. R. A. Fisher suggested blocking on discrete covariates in the design stage or conducting analysis of covariance in the analysis stage. We can embed blocking in a wider class of experimental design called rerandomization, and extend the…
Summary The paper presents an incremental updating algorithm to analyse streaming data sets using generalized linear models. The method proposed is formulated within a new framework of renewable estimation and incremental inference, in which the maximum likelihood estimator is renewed with current data and summary statistics of historical data. Our framework can be implemented within a popular distributed computing environment, known as Apache Spark, to scale up computation.…
Summary We extend the omitted variable bias framework with a suite of tools for sensitivity analysis in regression models that does not require assumptions on the functional form of the treatment assignment mechanism nor on the distribution of the unobserved confounders, naturally handles multiple confounders, possibly acting non-linearly, exploits expert knowledge to bound sensitivity parameters and can be easily computed by using only standard regression results. In…
Summary We develop new multiscale methods to test qualitative hypotheses about the function m in the non-parametric regression model Yt, T = m(t/T) + ɛt with time series errors ɛt. In time series applications, m represents a non-parametric time trend. Practitioners are often interested in whether the trend m has certain shape properties. For example, they would like to know whether m is constant or whether it is increasing or decreasing in certain time intervals. Our…
Summary Bayesian hierarchical models are used to share information between related samples and to obtain more accurate estimates of sample level parameters, common structure and variation between samples. When the parameter of interest is the distribution or density of a continuous variable, a hierarchical model for continuous distributions is required. Various such models have been described in the literature using extensions of the Dirichlet process and related processes,…
Summary Standard methods for inference about direct and indirect effects require stringent no-unmeasured-confounding assumptions which often fail to hold in practice, particularly in observational studies. The goal of the paper is to introduce a new form of indirect effect, the population intervention indirect effect, that can be non-parametrically identified in the presence of an unmeasured common cause of exposure and outcome. This new type of indirect effect captures the…
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…
Summary We propose a Bayesian empirical likelihood approach to survey data analysis on a vector of finite population parameters defined through estimating equations. Our method allows overidentified estimating equation systems and is applicable to both smooth and non-differentiable estimating functions. Our proposed Bayesian estimator is design consistent for general sampling designs and the Bayesian credible intervals are calibrated in the sense of having asymptotically…
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…
Jere Koskela · Paul A. Jenkins · Adam M. Johansen · Dario Spanò·刊期 2020-02-01 · 卷 48(1)·The Annals of Statistics已编入正刊
We study weighted particle systems in which new generations are resampled from current particles with probabilities proportional to their weights. This covers a broad class of sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods, widely-used in applied statistics and cognate disciplines. We consider the genealogical tree embedded into such particle systems, and identify conditions, as well as an appropriate time-scaling, under which they converge to the Kingman $n$-coalescent in the…
Edgar Dobriban · William Leeb · Amit Singer·刊期 2020-02-01 · 卷 48(1)·The Annals of Statistics已编入正刊
线性变换尖峰模型中的最优预测AI 解读
We consider the linearly transformed spiked model, where the observations $Y_{i}$ are noisy linear transforms of unobserved signals of interest $X_{i}$: \begin{equation*}Y_{i}=A_{i}X_{i}+\varepsilon_{i},\end{equation*} for $i=1,\ldots ,n$. The transform matrices $A_{i}$ are also observed. We model the unobserved signals (or regression coefficients) $X_{i}$ as vectors lying on an unknown low-dimensional space. Given only $Y_{i}$ and $A_{i}$ how should we predict or recover…
Vladimir Koltchinskii · Matthias Löffler · Richard Nickl·刊期 2020-02-01 · 卷 48(1)·The Annals of Statistics已编入正刊
主成分线性泛函的有效估计AI 解读
We study principal component analysis (PCA) for mean zero i.i.d. Gaussian observations $X_{1},\dots,X_{n}$ in a separable Hilbert space $\mathbb{H}$ with unknown covariance operator $\Sigma $. The complexity of the problem is characterized by its effective rank $\mathbf{r}(\Sigma):=\frac{\operatorname{tr}(\Sigma)}{\|\Sigma \|}$, where $\mathrm{tr}(\Sigma)$ denotes the trace of $\Sigma $ and $\|\Sigma\|$ denotes its operator norm. We develop a method of bias reduction in the…
François Bachoc · David Preinerstorfer · Lukas Steinberger·刊期 2020-02-01 · 卷 48(1)·The Annals of Statistics已编入正刊
模型选择后具有一致有效性的置信区间AI 解读
We suggest general methods to construct asymptotically uniformly valid confidence intervals post-model-selection. The constructions are based on principles recently proposed by Berk et al. (Ann. Statist. 41 (2013) 802–837). In particular, the candidate models used can be misspecified, the target of inference is model-specific, and coverage is guaranteed for any data-driven model selection procedure. After developing a general theory, we apply our methods to practically…
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…
This paper proposes a numerical bootstrap method that is consistent in many cases where the standard bootstrap is known to fail and where the $m$-out-of-$n$ bootstrap and subsampling have been the most commonly used inference approaches. We provide asymptotic analysis under both fixed and drifting parameter sequences, and we compare the approximation error of the numerical bootstrap with that of the $m$-out-of-$n$ bootstrap and subsampling. Finally, we discuss applications…
Statistical inference for exponential-family models of random graphs with dependent edges is challenging. We stress the importance of additional structure and show that additional structure facilitates statistical inference. A simple example of a random graph with additional structure is a random graph with neighborhoods and local dependence within neighborhoods. We develop the first concentration and consistency results for maximum likelihood and $M$-estimators of a wide…
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…
Davy Paindaveine · Julien Remy · Thomas Verdebout·刊期 2020-02-01 · 卷 48(1)·The Annals of Statistics已编入正刊
弱可识别性下的主成分方向检验AI 解读
We consider the problem of testing, on the basis of a $p$-variate Gaussian random sample, the null hypothesis $\mathcal{H}_{0}:\boldsymbol{\theta}_{1}=\boldsymbol{\theta}_{1}^{0}$ against the alternative $\mathcal{H}_{1}:\boldsymbol{\theta}_{1}\neq \boldsymbol{\theta}_{1}^{0}$, where $\boldsymbol{\theta}_{1}$ is the “first” eigenvector of the underlying covariance matrix and $\boldsymbol{\theta}_{1}^{0}$ is a fixed unit $p$-vector. In the classical setup where eigenvalues $\lambda_{1}>\lambda_{2}\geq \cdots \geq \lambda_{p}$…
Suppose that a confidence region is desired for a subvector $\theta $ of a multidimensional parameter $\xi =(\theta ,\psi )$, based on an M-estimator $\hat{\xi }_{n}=(\hat{\theta }_{n},\hat{\psi }_{n})$ calculated from a random sample of size $n$. Under nonstandard conditions $\hat{\xi }_{n}$ often converges at a nonregular rate $r_{n}$, in which case consistent estimation of the distribution of $r_{n}(\hat{\theta }_{n}-\theta )$, a pivot commonly chosen for confidence…
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 study weighted particle systems in which new generations are resampled from current particles with probabilities proportional to their weights. This covers a broad class of sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods, widely-used in applied statistics and cognate disciplines. We consider the genealogical tree embedded into such particle systems, and identify conditions, as well as an appropriate time-scaling, under which they converge to the Kingman n-coalescent in the…
We consider the linearly transformed spiked model, where the observations Yi are noisy linear transforms of unobserved signals of interest Xi: Yi=AiXi+εi, for i=1,…,n. The transform matrices Ai are also observed. We model the unobserved signals (or regression coefficients) Xi as vectors lying on an unknown low-dimensional space. Given only Yi and Ai how should we predict or recover…
We study principal component analysis (PCA) for mean zero i.i.d. Gaussian observations X1,…,Xn in a separable Hilbert space H with unknown covariance operator Σ. The complexity of the problem is characterized by its effective rank r(Σ):=∥Σ∥tr(Σ), where tr(Σ) denotes the trace of Σ and ∥Σ∥ denotes its operator norm. We develop a method of bias reduction in the…
This paper proposes a numerical bootstrap method that is consistent in many cases where the standard bootstrap is known to fail and where the m-out-of-n bootstrap and subsampling have been the most commonly used inference approaches. We provide asymptotic analysis under both fixed and drifting parameter sequences, and we compare the approximation error of the numerical bootstrap with that of the m-out-of-n bootstrap and subsampling. Finally, we discuss applications…
Statistical inference for exponential-family models of random graphs with dependent edges is challenging. We stress the importance of additional structure and show that additional structure facilitates statistical inference. A simple example of a random graph with additional structure is a random graph with neighborhoods and local dependence within neighborhoods. We develop the first concentration and consistency results for maximum likelihood and M-estimators of a wide…
We consider the problem of testing, on the basis of a p-variate Gaussian random sample, the null hypothesis H0:θ1=θ10 against the alternative H1:θ1=θ10, where θ1 is the “first” eigenvector of the underlying covariance matrix and θ10 is a fixed unit p-vector. In the classical setup where eigenvalues λ1>λ2≥⋯≥λp…
Suppose that a confidence region is desired for a subvector θ of a multidimensional parameter ξ=(θ,ψ), based on an M-estimator ξ^n=(θ^n,ψ^n) calculated from a random sample of size n. Under nonstandard conditions ξ^n often converges at a nonregular rate rn, in which case consistent estimation of the distribution of rn(θ^n−θ), a pivot commonly chosen for confidence…