Strong consistency of the maximum likelihood estimator for finite mixtures of location-scale distributions when penalty is imposed on the ratios of the scale parameters
Kentaro Tanaka
备注:
29 pages, 2 figures
发表信息:
Scandinavian Journal of Statistics, 36, (2009), 171-184
In finite mixtures of location-scale distributions, if there is no constraint or penalty on the parameters, then the maximum likelihood estimator does not exist because the likelihood is unbounded. To avoid this problem, we consider a penalized likelihood, where the penalty is a function of the minimum of the ratios of the scale parameters and the sample size. It is shown that the penalized maximum likelihood estimator is strongly consistent. We also analyze the consistency of a penalized maximum likelihood estimator where the penalty is imposed on the scale parameters themselves.
Penalization of the likelihood by Jeffreys' invariant prior, or by a positive power thereof, is shown to produce finite-valued maximum penalized likelihood estimates in a broad class of binomial generalized linear models. The class of models includes logistic regression, where the Jeffreys-prior penalty is known additionally to reduce the asymptotic bias of the maximum likelihood estimator; and also models with other commonly used link functions such as probit and log-log. Shrinkage towards equiprobability across observations, relative to the maximum likelihood estimator, is established theore…
We show that large-scale typicality of Markov sample paths implies that the likelihood ratio statistic satisfies a law of iterated logarithm uniformly to the same scale. As a consequence, the penalized likelihood Markov order estimator is strongly consistent for penalties growing as slowly as log log n when an upper bound is imposed on the order which may grow as rapidly as log n. Our method of proof, using techniques from empirical process theory, does not rely on the explicit expression for the maximum likelihood estimator in the Markov case and could therefore be applicable in other setting…
We study the law of the iterated logarithm (LIL) for the maximum likelihood estimation of the parameters (as a convex optimization problem) in the generalized linear models with independent or weakly dependent ($ρ$-mixing, $m$-dependent) responses under mild conditions. The LIL is useful to derive the asymptotic bounds for the discrepancy between the empirical process of the log-likelihood function and the true log-likelihood. As the application of the LIL, the strong consistency of some penalized likelihood based model selection criteria can be shown. Under some regularity conditions, the mod…
This paper develops a general theory on rates of convergence of penalized spline estimators for function estimation when the likelihood functional is concave in candidate functions, where the likelihood is interpreted in a broad sense that includes conditional likelihood, quasi-likelihood, and pseudo-likelihood. The theory allows all feasible combinations of the spline degree, the penalty order, and the smoothness of the unknown functions. According to this theory, the asymptotic behaviors of the penalized spline estimators depends on interplay between the spline knot number and the penalty pa…
Gibbs point processes (GPPs) constitute a large and flexible class of spatial point processes with explicit dependence between the points. They can model attractive as well as repulsive point patterns. Feature selection procedures are an important topic in high-dimensional statistical modeling. In this paper, composite likelihood approach regularized with convex and non-convex penalty functions is proposed to handle statistical inference for possibly high-dimensional inhomogeneous GPPs. The composite likelihood incorporates both the pseudo-likelihood and the logistic composite likelihood. We p…
In this paper, we study the model selection and structure specification for the generalised semi-varying coefficient models (GSVCMs), where the number of potential covariates is allowed to be larger than the sample size. We first propose a penalised likelihood method with the LASSO penalty function to obtain the preliminary estimates of the functional coefficients. Then, using the quadratic approximation for the local log-likelihood function and the adaptive group LASSO penalty (or the local linear approximation of the group SCAD penalty) with the help of the preliminary estimation of the func…
Growth in both size and complexity of modern data challenges the applicability of traditional likelihood-based inference. Composite likelihood (CL) methods address the difficulties related to model selection and computational intractability of the full likelihood by combining a number of low-dimensional likelihood objects into a single objective function used for inference. This paper introduces a procedure to combine partial likelihood objects from a large set of feasible candidates and simultaneously carry out parameter estimation. The new method constructs estimating equations balancing sta…
We consider model selection in generalized linear models (GLM) for high-dimensional data and propose a wide class of model selection criteria based on penalized maximum likelihood with a complexity penalty on the model size. We derive a general nonasymptotic upper bound for the expected Kullback-Leibler divergence between the true distribution of the data and that generated by a selected model, and establish the corresponding minimax lower bounds for sparse GLM. For the properly chosen (nonlinear) penalty, the resulting penalized maximum likelihood estimator is shown to be asymptotically minim…
A new family of penalty functions, adaptive to likelihood, is introduced for model selection in general regression models. It arises naturally through assuming certain types of prior distribution on the regression parameters. To study stability properties of the penalized maximum likelihood estimator, two types of asymptotic stability are defined. Theoretical properties, including the parameter estimation consistency, model selection consistency, and asymptotic stability, are established under suitable regularity conditions. An efficient coordinate-descent algorithm is proposed. Simulation res…
We extend the constrained maximum likelihood estimation theory for parameters of a completely identified model, proposed by Aitchison and Silvey (1958), to parameters arising from a partially identified model. With a partially identified model, some parameters of the model may only be identified through constraints imposed by additional assumptions. We show that, under certain conditions, the constrained maximum likelihood estimator exists and locally maximize the likelihood function subject to constraints. We then study the asymptotic distribution of the estimator and propose a numerical algo…
Comparisons are made for the amount of agreement of the composite likelihood information criteria and their full likelihood counterparts when making decisions among the fits of different models, and some properties of penalty term for composite likelihood information criteria are obtained. Asymptotic theory is given for the case when a simpler model is nested within a bigger model, and the bigger model approaches the simpler model under a sequence of local alternatives. Composite likelihood can more or less frequently choose the bigger model, depending on the direction of local alternatives; i…
We extend the correspondence between two-stage coding procedures in data compression and penalized likelihood procedures in statistical estimation. Traditionally, this had required restriction to countable parameter spaces. We show how to extend this correspondence in the uncountable parameter case. Leveraging the description length interpretations of penalized likelihood procedures we devise new techniques to derive adaptive risk bounds of such procedures. We show that the existence of certain countable coverings of the parameter space implies adaptive risk bounds and thus our theory is quite…
A class of variable selection procedures for parametric models via nonconcave penalized likelihood was proposed by Fan and Li to simultaneously estimate parameters and select important variables. They demonstrated that this class of procedures has an oracle property when the number of parameters is finite. However, in most model selection problems the number of parameters should be large and grow with the sample size. In this paper some asymptotic properties of the nonconcave penalized likelihood are established for situations in which the number of parameters tends to \infty as the sample siz…
Maximum likelihood estimation in logistic regression with mixed effects is known to often result in estimates on the boundary of the parameter space. Such estimates, which include infinite values for fixed effects and singular or infinite variance components, can cause havoc to numerical estimation procedures and inference. We introduce an appropriately scaled additive penalty to the log-likelihood function, or an approximation thereof, which penalizes the fixed effects by the Jeffreys' invariant prior for the model with no random effects and the variance components by a composition of negativ…
In this technical report, we consider conditional density estimation with a maximum likelihood approach. Under weak assumptions, we obtain a theoretical bound for a Kullback-Leibler type loss for a single model maximum likelihood estimate. We use a penalized model selection technique to select a best model within a collection. We give a general condition on penalty choice that leads to oracle type inequality for the resulting estimate. This construction is applied to two examples of partition-based conditional density models, models in which the conditional density depends only in a piecewise …
This paper studies the model selection problem in a large class of causal time series models, which includes both the ARMA or AR($\infty$) processes, as well as the GARCH or ARCH($\infty$), APARCH, ARMA-GARCH and many others processes. To tackle this issue, we consider a penalized contrast based on the quasi-likelihood of the model. We provide sufficient conditions for the penalty term to ensure the consistency of the proposed procedure as well as the consistency and the asymptotic normality of the quasi-maximum likelihood estimator of the chosen model. It appears from these conditions that th…
It is well known that the empirical likelihood ratio confidence region suffers finite sample under-coverage issue, and this severely hampers its application in statistical inferences.} The root cause of this under-coverage is an upper limit imposed by the convex hull of the estimating functions that is used in the construction of the profile empirical likelihood. For i.i.d data, various methods have been proposed to solve this issue by modifying the convex hull, but it is not clear how well these methods perform when the data are no longer independent. In this paper, we propose an adjusted blo…
The von Mises-Fisher distribution is one of the most widely used probability distributions to describe directional data. Finite mixtures of von Mises-Fisher distributions have found numerous applications. However, the likelihood function for the finite mixture of von Mises-Fisher distributions is unbounded and consequently the maximum likelihood estimation is not well defined. To address the problem of likelihood degeneracy, we consider a penalized maximum likelihood approach whereby a penalty function is incorporated. We prove strong consistency of the resulting estimator. An Expectation-Maxi…
We propose a sparse coefficient estimation and automated model selection procedure for autoregressive (AR) processes with heavy-tailed innovations based on penalized conditional maximum likelihood. Under mild moment conditions on the innovation processes, the penalized conditional maximum likelihood estimator (PCMLE) satisfies a strong consistency, $O_P(N^{-1/2})$ consistency, and the oracle properties, where N is the sample size. We have the freedom in choosing penalty functions based on the weak conditions on them. Two penalty functions, least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO…
For high-dimensional linear regression models, we review and compare several estimators of variances $τ^2$ and $σ^2$ of the random slopes and errors, respectively. These variances relate directly to ridge regression penalty $λ$ and heritability index $h^2$, often used in genetics. Direct and indirect estimators of these, either based on cross-validation (CV) or maximum marginal likelihood (MML), are also discussed. The comparisons include several cases of covariate matrix $\mathbf{X}_{n \times p}$, with $p \gg n$, such as multi-collinear covariates and data-derived ones. In addition, we study …
It is common in phylogenetics to have some, perhaps partial, information about the overall evolutionary tree of a group of organisms and wish to find an evolutionary tree of a specific gene for those organisms. There may not be enough information in the gene sequences alone to accurately reconstruct the correct "gene tree." Although the gene tree may deviate from the "species tree" due to a variety of genetic processes, in the absence of evidence to the contrary it is parsimonious to assume that they agree. A common statistical approach in these situations is to develop a likelihood penalty to…
In this paper we propose a new optimization model for maximum likelihood estimation of causal and invertible ARMA models. Through a set of numerical experiments we show how our proposed model outperforms, both in terms of quality of the fitted model as well as in the computational time, the classical estimation procedure based on Jones reparametrization. We also propose a regularization term in the model and we show how this addition improves the out of sample quality of the fitted model. This improvement is achieved thanks to an increased penalty on models close to the non causality or non in…
We consider the problem of selecting covariates in spatial linear models with Gaussian process errors. Penalized maximum likelihood estimation (PMLE) that enables simultaneous variable selection and parameter estimation is developed and, for ease of computation, PMLE is approximated by one-step sparse estimation (OSE). To further improve computational efficiency, particularly with large sample sizes, we propose penalized maximum covariance-tapered likelihood estimation (PMLE$_{\mathrm{T}}$) and its one-step sparse estimation (OSE$_{\mathrm{T}}$). General forms of penalty functions with an emph…
NYU Grossman School of Medicine(纽约大学格罗斯曼医学院);University of California, Irvine(加州大学欧文分校)
Despite recent advances in algorithmic fairness, methodologies for achieving fairness with generalized linear models (GLMs) have yet to be explored in general, despite GLMs being widely used in practice. In this paper we introduce two fairness criteria for GLMs based on equalizing expected outcomes or log-likelihoods. We prove that for GLMs both criteria can be achieved via a convex penalty term based solely on the linear components of the GLM, thus permitting efficient optimization. We also derive theoretical properties for the resulting fair GLM estimator. To empirically demonstrate the effi…
Penalized likelihood methods are fundamental to ultra-high dimensional variable selection. How high dimensionality such methods can handle remains largely unknown. In this paper, we show that in the context of generalized linear models, such methods possess model selection consistency with oracle properties even for dimensionality of Non-Polynomial (NP) order of sample size, for a class of penalized likelihood approaches using folded-concave penalty functions, which were introduced to ameliorate the bias problems of convex penalty functions. This fills a long-standing gap in the literature whe…
We consider a dynamical system with small noise for which the drift is parametrized by a finite dimensional parameter. For this model we consider minimum distance estimation from continuous time observations under $l^p$-penalty imposed on the parameters in the spirit of the Lasso approach with the aim of simultaneous estimation and model selection. We study the consistency and the asymptotic distribution of these Lasso-type estimators for different values of $p$. For $p=1$ we also consider the adaptive version of the Lasso estimator and establish its oracle properties.
Accelerated algorithms for maximum likelihood image reconstruction are essential for emerging applications such as 3D tomography, dynamic tomographic imaging, and other high dimensional inverse problems. In this paper, we introduce and analyze a class of fast and stable sequential optimization methods for computing maximum likelihood estimates and study its convergence properties. These methods are based on a {\it proximal point algorithm} implemented with the Kullback-Liebler (KL) divergence between posterior densities of the complete data as a proximal penalty function. When the proximal rel…
Data in the form of networks are increasingly available in a variety of areas, yet statistical models allowing for parameter estimates with desirable statistical properties for sparse networks remain scarce. To address this, we propose the Sparse $β$-Model (S$β$M), a new network model that interpolates the celebrated Erdős-Rényi model and the $β$-model that assigns one different parameter to each node. By a novel reparameterization of the $β$-model to distinguish global and local parameters, our S$β$M can drastically reduce the dimensionality of the $β$-model by requiring some of the local par…
Mixture of Experts (MoE) are successful models for modeling heterogeneous data in many statistical learning problems including regression, clustering and classification. Generally fitted by maximum likelihood estimation via the well-known EM algorithm, their application to high-dimensional problems is still therefore challenging. We consider the problem of fitting and feature selection in MoE models, and propose a regularized maximum likelihood estimation approach that encourages sparse solutions for heterogeneous regression data models with potentially high-dimensional predictors. Unlike stat…
Penalized likelihood inference for beta-binomial meta-analysis of proportions of rare events
The Graduate Institute for Advanced Studies, The Graduate University for Advanced Studies(高级研究研究生院,高级研究院);Department of Interdisciplinary Statistical Mathematics, The Institute of Statistical Mathematics(统计数学系,统计数学研究所)
The popularity of penalized regression in high-dimensional data analysis has led to a demand for new inferential tools for these models. False discovery rate control is widely used in high-dimensional hypothesis testing, but has only recently been considered in the context of penalized regression. Almost all of this work, however, has focused on lasso-penalized linear regression. In this paper, we derive a general method for controlling the marginal false discovery rate that can be applied to any penalized likelihood-based model, such as logistic regression and Cox regression. Our approach is …
In high-dimensional model selection problems, penalized simple least-square approaches have been extensively used. This paper addresses the question of both robustness and efficiency of penalized model selection methods, and proposes a data-driven weighted linear combination of convex loss functions, together with weighted $L_1$-penalty. It is completely data-adaptive and does not require prior knowledge of the error distribution. The weighted $L_1$-penalty is used both to ensure the convexity of the penalty term and to ameliorate the bias caused by the $L_1$-penalty. In the setting with dimen…
Mila(米拉);Université de Montréal(蒙特利尔大学);Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR)(加拿大高等研究院(CIFAR));Institute for Data Valorization (IVADO)(数据价值化研究所(IVADO))
Maximum likelihood estimation of energy-based models is a challenging problem due to the intractability of the log-likelihood gradient. In this work, we propose learning both the energy function and an amortized approximate sampling mechanism using a neural generator network, which provides an efficient approximation of the log-likelihood gradient. The resulting objective requires maximizing entropy of the generated samples, which we perform using recently proposed nonparametric mutual information estimators. Finally, to stabilize the resulting adversarial game, we use a zero-centered gradient…
Many penalized maximum likelihood estimators correspond to posterior mode estimators under specific prior distributions. Appropriateness of a particular class of penalty functions can therefore be interpreted as the appropriateness of a prior for the parameters. For example, the appropriateness of a lasso penalty for regression coefficients depends on the extent to which the empirical distribution of the regression coefficients resembles a Laplace distribution. We give a testing procedure of whether or not a Laplace prior is appropriate and accordingly, whether or not using a lasso penalized e…
In this study, we consider unsupervised clustering of categorical vectors that can be of different size using mixture. We use likelihood maximization to estimate the parameters of the underlying mixture model and a penalization technique to select the number of mixture components. Regardless of the true distribution that generated the data, we show that an explicit penalty, known up to a multiplicative constant, leads to a non-asymptotic oracle inequality with the Kullback-Leibler divergence on the two sides of the inequality. This theoretical result is illustrated by a document clustering app…
Penalized methods are applied to quasi likelihood analysis for stochastic differential equation models. In this paper, we treat the quasi likelihood function and the associated statistical random field for which a polynomial type large deviation inequality holds. Then penalty terms do not disturb a polynomial type large deviation inequality. This property ensures the convergence of moments of the associated estimator which plays an important role to evaluate the upper bound of the probability that model selection is incorrect.
The paper deals with generalized functional regression. The aim is to estimate the influence of covariates on observations, drawn from an exponential distribution. The link considered has a semiparametric expression: if we are interested in a functional influence of some covariates, we authorize others to be modeled linearly. We thus consider a generalized partially linear regression model with unknown regression coefficients and an unknown nonparametric function. We present a maximum penalized likelihood procedure to estimate the components of the model introducing penalty based wavelet estim…
Fan and Li propose a family of variable selection methods via penalized likelihood using concave penalty functions. The nonconcave penalized likelihood estimators enjoy the oracle properties, but maximizing the penalized likelihood function is computationally challenging, because the objective function is nondifferentiable and nonconcave. In this article, we propose a new unified algorithm based on the local linear approximation (LLA) for maximizing the penalized likelihood for a broad class of concave penalty functions. Convergence and other theoretical properties of the LLA algorithm are est…
We wish to estimate conditional density using Gaussian Mixture Regression model with logistic weights and means depending on the covariate. We aim at selecting the number of components of this model as well as the other parameters by a penalized maximum likelihood approach. We provide a lower bound on penalty, proportional up to a logarithmic term to the dimension of each model, that ensures an oracle inequality for our estimator. Our theoretical analysis is supported by some numerical experiments.
Variable selection is fundamental to high-dimensional statistical modeling. Many variable selection techniques may be implemented by maximum penalized likelihood using various penalty functions. Optimizing the penalized likelihood function is often challenging because it may be nondifferentiable and/or nonconcave. This article proposes a new class of algorithms for finding a maximizer of the penalized likelihood for a broad class of penalty functions. These algorithms operate by perturbing the penalty function slightly to render it differentiable, then optimizing this differentiable function u…
We derive an asymptotic expansion for the log likelihood of Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) with equal covariance matrices in the low signal-to-noise regime. The expansion reveals an intimate connection between two types of algorithms for parameter estimation: the method of moments and likelihood optimizing algorithms such as Expectation-Maximization (EM). We show that likelihood optimization in the low SNR regime reduces to a sequence of least squares optimization problems that match the moments of the estimate to the ground truth moments one by one. This connection is a stepping stone toward …
We consider the problem of estimation of a shift parameter of an unknown symmetric function in Gaussian white noise. We introduce a notion of semiparametric second-order efficiency and propose estimators that are semiparametrically efficient and second-order efficient in our model. These estimators are of a penalized maximum likelihood type with an appropriately chosen penalty. We argue that second-order efficiency is crucial in semiparametric problems since only the second-order terms in asymptotic expansion for the risk account for the behavior of the ``nonparametric component'' of a semipar…