Regression problems are traditionally analyzed via univariate characteristics like the regression function, scale function and marginal density of regression errors. These characteristics are useful and informative whenever the association between the predictor and the response is relatively simple. More detailed information about the association can be provided by the conditional density of the response given the predictor. For the first time in the literature, this article develops the theory of minimax estimation of the conditional density for regression settings with fixed and random designs of predictors, bounded and unbounded responses and a vast set of anisotropic classes of conditional densities. The study of fixed design regression is of special interest and novelty because the known literature is devoted to the case of random predictors. For the aforementioned models, the paper suggests a universal adaptive estimator which (i) matches performance of an oracle that knows both an underlying model and an estimated conditional density; (ii) is sharp minimax over a vast class of anisotropic conditional densities; (iii) is at least rate minimax when the response is independent of the predictor and thus a bivariate conditional density becomes a univariate density; (iv) is adaptive to an underlying design (fixed or random) of predictors.
In cluster-specific studies, ordinary logistic regression and conditional logistic regression for binary outcomes provide maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) and conditional maximum likelihood estimator (CMLE), respectively. In this paper, we show that CMLE is approaching to MLE asymptotically when each individual data point is replicated infinitely many times. Our theoretical derivation is based on the observation that a term appearing in the conditional average log-likelihood function is the coefficient of a polynomial, and hence can be transformed to a complex integral by Cauchy's differenti…
The partial copula provides a method for describing the dependence between two random variables $X$ and $Y$ conditional on a third random vector $Z$ in terms of nonparametric residuals $U_1$ and $U_2$. This paper develops a nonparametric test for conditional independence by combining the partial copula with a quantile regression based method for estimating the nonparametric residuals. We consider a test statistic based on generalized correlation between $U_1$ and $U_2$ and derive its large sample properties under consistency assumptions on the quantile regression procedure. We demonstrate thro…
Under a single-index regression assumption, we introduce a new semiparametric procedure to estimate a conditional density of a censored response. The regression model can be seen as a generalization of Cox regression model and also as a profitable tool to perform dimension reduction under censoring. This technique extends the results of Delecroix et al. (2003). We derive consistency and asymptotic normality of our estimator of the index parameter by proving its asymptotic equivalence with the (uncomputable) maximum likelihood estimator, using martingales results for counting processes and argu…
Consider a high-dimensional linear regression problem, where the number of covariates is larger than the number of observations and the interest is in estimating the conditional variance of the response variable given the covariates. A conditional and unconditioned framework are considered, where conditioning is with respect to the covariates, which are ancillary to the parameter of interest. In recent papers, a consistent estimator was developed in the unconditional framework when the marginal distribution of the covariates is normal with known mean and variance. In the present work, a certai…
In this paper, we study the asymptotic normality of the conditional maximum likelihood (ML) estimators for the truncated regression model and the Tobit model. We show that under the general setting assumed in his book, the conjectures made by Hayashi (2000) \footnote{see page 516, and page 520 of Hayashi (2000).} about the asymptotic normality of the conditional ML estimators for both models are true, namely, a sufficient condition is the nonsingularity of $\mathbf{x_tx'_t}$.
If X and Y are real valued random variables such that the first moments of X, Y, and XY exist and the conditional expectation of Y given X is an affine function of X, then the intercept and slope of the conditional expectation equal the intercept and slope of the least squares linear regression function, even though Y may not have a finite second moment. As a consequence, the affine in X form of the conditional expectation and zero covariance imply mean independence.
We propose an estimation method for the conditional mode when the conditioning variable is high-dimensional. In the proposed method, we first estimate the conditional density by solving quantile regressions multiple times. We then estimate the conditional mode by finding the maximum of the estimated conditional density. The proposed method has two advantages in that it is computationally stable because it has no initial parameter dependencies, and it is statistically efficient with a fast convergence rate. Synthetic and real-world data experiments demonstrate the better performance of the prop…
This paper addresses the problem of semiparametric efficiency bounds for conditional moment restriction models with different conditioning variables. We characterize such an efficiency bound, that in general is not explicit, as a limit of explicit efficiency bounds for a decreasing sequence of unconditional (marginal) moment restriction models. An iterative procedure for approximating the efficient score when this is not explicit is provided. Our theoretical results complete and extend existing results in the literature, provide new insight for the theory of semiparametric efficiency bounds li…
We consider high-dimensional multivariate linear regression models, where the joint distribution of covariates and response variables is a multivariate normal distribution with a bandable covariance matrix. The main goal of this paper is to estimate the regression coefficient matrix, which is a function of the bandable covariance matrix. Although the tapering estimator of covariance has the minimax optimal convergence rate for the class of bandable covariances, we show that it has a sub-optimal convergence rate for the regression coefficient; that is, a minimax estimator for the class of banda…
Quantile regression is a technique to estimate conditional quantile curves. It provides a comprehensive picture of a response contingent on explanatory variables. In a flexible modeling framework, a specific form of the conditional quantile curve is not a priori fixed. % Indeed, the majority of applications do not per se require specific functional forms. This motivates a local parametric rather than a global fixed model fitting approach. A nonparametric smoothing estimator of the conditional quantile curve requires to balance between local curvature and stochastic variability. In this paper, …
In this paper, we develop uniform inference methods for the conditional mode based on quantile regression. Specifically, we propose to estimate the conditional mode by minimizing the derivative of the estimated conditional quantile function defined by smoothing the linear quantile regression estimator, and develop two bootstrap methods, a novel pivotal bootstrap and the nonparametric bootstrap, for our conditional mode estimator. Building on high-dimensional Gaussian approximation techniques, we establish the validity of simultaneous confidence rectangles constructed from the two bootstrap met…
Nonparametric regression quantiles obtained by inverting a kernel estimator of the conditional distribution of the response are long established in statistics. Attention has been, however, restricted to ordinary quantiles staying away from the tails of the conditional distribution. The purpose of this paper is to extend their asymptotic theory far enough into the tails. We focus on extremal quantile regression estimators of a response variable given a vector of covariates in the general setting, whether the conditional extreme-value index is positive, negative, or zero. Specifically, we elucid…
An adaptive nonparametric estimation procedure is constructed for the estimation problem of heteroscedastic regression when the noise variance depends on the unknown regression. A non-asymptotic upper bound for a quadratic risk (an oracle inequality) is constructed.
In this article, we propose a penalized high dimensional semiparametric model average quantile prediction approach that is robust for forecasting the conditional quantile of the response. We consider a two-step estimation procedure. In the first step, we use a local linear regression approach to estimate the individual marginal quantile functions, and approximate the conditional quantile of the response by an affine combination of one-dimensional marginal quantile regression functions. In the second step, based on the nonparametric kernel estimates of the marginal quantile regression functions…
We extend the celebrated Stone's theorem to the framework of distributional regression. More precisely, we prove that weighted empirical distribution with local probability weights satisfying the conditions of Stone's theorem provide universally consistent estimates of the conditional distributions, where the error is measured by the Wasserstein distance of order p $\ge$ 1. Furthermore, for p = 1, we determine the minimax rates of convergence on specific classes of distributions. We finally provide some applications of these results, including the estimation of conditional tail expectation or …
We establish the asymptotic normality of the kernel type estimator for the regression function constructed from quasi-associated data when the explanatory variable takes its values in a separable Hilbert space.
In this paper, we consider estimation of the conditional mode of an outcome variable given regressors. To this end, we propose and analyze a computationally scalable estimator derived from a linear quantile regression model and develop asymptotic distributional theory for the estimator. Specifically, we find that the pointwise limiting distribution is a scale transformation of Chernoff's distribution despite the presence of regressors. In addition, we consider analytical and subsampling-based confidence intervals for the proposed estimator. We also conduct Monte Carlo simulations to assess the…
This paper deals with the estimation of hidden periodicities in a non-linear regression model with stationary noise displaying cyclical dependence. Consistency and asymptotic normality are established for the least-squares estimates.
We consider inference procedures, conditional on an observed ancillary statistic, for regression coefficients under a linear regression setup where the unknown error distribution is specified nonparametrically. We establish conditional asymptotic normality of the regression coefficient estimators under regularity conditions, and formally justify the approach of plugging in kernel-type density estimators in conditional inference procedures. Simulation results show that the approach yields accurate conditional coverage probabilities when used for constructing confidence intervals. The plug-in ap…
Quantile regression is an increasingly important empirical tool in economics and other sciences for analyzing the impact of a set of regressors on the conditional distribution of an outcome. Extremal quantile regression, or quantile regression applied to the tails, is of interest in many economic and financial applications, such as conditional value-at-risk, production efficiency, and adjustment bands in (S,s) models. In this paper we provide feasible inference tools for extremal conditional quantile models that rely upon extreme value approximations to the distribution of self-normalized quan…
In this paper, a nonparametric estimator is proposed for estimating the L1-median for multivariate conditional distribution when the covariates take values in an infinite dimensional space. The multivariate case is more appropriate to predict the components of a vector of random variables simultaneously rather than predicting each of them separately. While estimating the conditional L1-median function using the well-known Nadarya-Waston estimator, we establish the strong consistency of this estimator as well as the asymptotic normality. We also present some simulations and provide how to built…
Outlier detection has gained increasing interest in recent years, due to newly emerging technologies and the huge amount of high-dimensional data that are now available. Outlier detection can help practitioners to identify unwanted noise and/or locate interesting abnormal observations. To address this, we developed a novel method for outlier detection for use in, possibly high-dimensional, datasets with both discrete and continuous variables. We exploit the family of decomposable graphical models in order to model the relationship between the variables and use this to form an exact likelihood …
We propose three novel consistent specification tests for quantile regression models which generalize former tests in three ways. First, we allow the covariate effects to be quantile-dependent and nonlinear. Second, we allow parameterizing the conditional quantile functions by appropriate basis functions, rather than parametrically. We are hence able to test for functional forms beyond linearity, while retaining the linear effects as special cases. In both cases, the induced class of conditional distribution functions is tested with a Cramér-von Mises type test statistic for which we derive th…
Density regression characterizes the conditional density of the response variable given the covariates, and provides much more information than the commonly used conditional mean or quantile regression. However, it is often computationally prohibitive in applications with massive data sets, especially when there are multiple covariates. In this paper, we develop a new data reduction approach for the density regression problem using conditional support points. After obtaining the representative data, we exploit the penalized likelihood method as the downstream estimation strategy. Based on the …
Compared to the conditional mean as a simple point estimator, the conditional density function is more informative to describe the distributions with multi-modality, asymmetry or heteroskedasticity. In this paper, we propose a novel parametric conditional density estimation method by showing the connection between the general density and the likelihood function of inhomogeneous Poisson process models. The maximum likelihood estimates can be obtained via weighted logistic regressions, and the computation can be significantly relaxed by combining a block-wise alternating maximization scheme and …
A general theory for Gaussian mean estimation that automatically adapts to unknown sparsity under arbitrary norms is proposed. The theory is applied to produce adaptively minimax rate-optimal estimators in high dimensional regression and matrix estimation that involve no tuning parameters.
We consider the robust adaptive nonparametric estimation problem for a periodic function observed in the framework of a continuous time regression model with semimartingale noises.
This paper considers quantile regression for a wide class of time series models including ARMA models with asymmetric GARCH (AGARCH) errors. The classical mean-variance models are reinterpreted as conditional location-scale models so that the quantile regression method can be naturally geared into the considered models. The consistency and asymptotic normality of the quantile regression estimator is established in location-scale time series models under mild conditions. In the application of this result to ARMA-AGARCH models, more primitive conditions are deduced to obtain the asymptotic prope…
This paper studies vector quantile regression (VQR), which is a way to model the dependence of a random vector of interest with respect to a vector of explanatory variables so to capture the whole conditional distribution, and not only the conditional mean. The problem of vector quantile regression is formulated as an optimal transport problem subject to an additional mean-independence condition. This paper provides a new set of results on VQR beyond the case with correct specification which had been the focus of previous work. First, we show that even under misspecification, the VQR problem s…
There is a growing demand for nonparametric conditional density estimators (CDEs) in fields such as astronomy and economics. In astronomy, for example, one can dramatically improve estimates of the parameters that dictate the evolution of the Universe by working with full conditional densities instead of regression (i.e., conditional mean) estimates. More generally, standard regression falls short in any prediction problem where the distribution of the response is more complex with multi-modality, asymmetry or heteroscedastic noise. Nevertheless, much of the work on high-dimensional inference …
The most direct way to express arbitrary dependencies in datasets is to estimate the joint distribution and to apply afterwards the argmax-function to obtain the mode of the corresponding conditional distribution. This method is in practice difficult, because it requires a global optimization of a complicated function, the joint distribution by fixed input variables. This article proposes a method for finding global maxima if the joint distribution is modeled by a kernel density estimation. Some experiments show advantages and shortcomings of the resulting regression method in comparison to th…
We propose dual regression as an alternative to the quantile regression process for the global estimation of conditional distribution functions under minimal assumptions. Dual regression provides all the interpretational power of the quantile regression process while avoiding the need for repairing the intersecting conditional quantile surfaces that quantile regression often produces in practice. Our approach introduces a mathematical programming characterization of conditional distribution functions which, in its simplest form, is the dual program of a simultaneous estimator for linear locati…
Estimating conditional quantiles of financial time series is essential for risk management and many other applications in finance. It is well-known that financial time series display conditional heteroscedasticity. Among the large number of conditional heteroscedastic models, the generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic (GARCH) process is the most popular and influential one. So far, feasible quantile regression methods for this task have been confined to a variant of the GARCH model, the linear GARCH model, owing to its tractable conditional quantile structure. This paper consid…
Personalized medicine seeks to identify the causal effect of treatment for a particular patient as opposed to a clinical population at large. Most investigators estimate such personalized treatment effects by regressing the outcome of a randomized clinical trial (RCT) on patient covariates. The realized value of the outcome may however lie far from the conditional expectation. We therefore introduce a method called Dirac Delta Regression (DDR) that estimates the entire conditional density from RCT data in order to visualize the probabilities across all possible outcome values. DDR transforms t…
Nonparametric regression is a standard statistical tool with increased importance in the Big Data era. Boundary points pose additional difficulties but local polynomial regression can be used to alleviate them. Local linear regression, for example, is easy to implement and performs quite well both at interior as well as boundary points. Estimating the conditional distribution function and/or the quantile function at a given regressor point is immediate via standard kernel methods but problems ensue if local linear methods are to be used. In particular, the distribution function estimator is no…
University of Arkansas（阿肯色大学）；Washington University in St. Louis（华盛顿大学圣路易斯分校）；M.I.T.（麻省理工学院）
Work in machine learning and statistics commonly focuses on building models that capture the vast majority of data, possibly ignoring a segment of the population as outliers. However, there does not often exist a good model on the whole dataset, so we seek to find a small subset where there exists a useful model. We are interested in finding a linear rule capable of achieving more accurate predictions for just a segment of the population. We give an efficient algorithm with theoretical analysis for the conditional linear regression task, which is the joint task of identifying a significant seg…
SZTAKI: Institute for Computer Science and Control（SZTAKI：计算机科学与控制研究所）；Eötvös Loránd Research Network（厄特沃什·罗兰研究网络）
In this paper we suggest two statistical hypothesis tests for the regression function of binary classification based on conditional kernel mean embeddings. The regression function is a fundamental object in classification as it determines both the Bayes optimal classifier and the misclassification probabilities. A resampling based framework is presented and combined with consistent point estimators of the conditional kernel mean map, in order to construct distribution-free hypothesis tests. These tests are introduced in a flexible manner allowing us to control the exact probability of type I e…
Often machine learning and statistical models will attempt to describe the majority of the data. However, there may be situations where only a fraction of the data can be fit well by a linear regression model. Here, we are interested in a case where such inliers can be identified by a Disjunctive Normal Form (DNF) formula. We give a polynomial time algorithm for the conditional linear regression task, which identifies a DNF condition together with the linear predictor on the corresponding portion of the data. In this work, we improve on previous algorithms by removing a requirement that the co…
This paper proposes a maximum-likelihood approach to jointly estimate marginal conditional quantiles of multivariate response variables in a linear regression framework. We consider a slight reparameterization of the Multivariate Asymmetric Laplace distribution proposed by Kotz et al (2001) and exploit its location-scale mixture representation to implement a new EM algorithm for estimating model parameters. The idea is to extend the link between the Asymmetric Laplace distribution and the well-known univariate quantile regression model to a multivariate context, i.e. when a multivariate depend…
Conventional multiclass conditional probability estimation methods, such as Fisher's discriminate analysis and logistic regression, often require restrictive distributional model assumption. In this paper, a model-free estimation method is proposed to estimate multiclass conditional probability through a series of conditional quantile regression functions. Specifically, the conditional class probability is formulated as difference of corresponding cumulative distribution functions, where the cumulative distribution functions can be converted from the estimated conditional quantile regression f…
Conditional Diffusion for Nonparametric Instrumental Variable Quantile Regression
Institute of Data Science and Statistics, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics（上海财经大学数据科学与统计研究院）；School of Mathematics and Statistics, Wuhan University（武汉大学数学与统计学院）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Wuhan University（武汉大学人工智能学院）
