This paper considers regularizing a covariance matrix of $p$ variables estimated from $n$ observations, by hard thresholding. We show that the thresholded estimate is consistent in the operator norm as long as the true covariance matrix is sparse in a suitable sense, the variables are Gaussian or sub-Gaussian, and $(\log p)/n\to0$, and obtain explicit rates. The results are uniform over families of covariance matrices which satisfy a fairly natural notion of sparsity. We discuss an intuitive resampling scheme for threshold selection and prove a general cross-validation result that justifies this approach. We also compare thresholding to other covariance estimators in simulations and on an example from climate data.
This paper deals with the estimation of a high-dimensional covariance with a conditional sparsity structure and fast-diverging eigenvalues. By assuming sparse error covariance matrix in an approximate factor model, we allow for the presence of some cross-sectional correlation even after taking out common but unobservable factors. We introduce the Principal Orthogonal complEment Thresholding (POET) method to explore such an approximate factor structure with sparsity. The POET estimator includes the sample covariance matrix, the factor-based covariance matrix (Fan, Fan, and Lv, 2008), the thresh…
Estimation of large covariance matrices has drawn considerable recent attention, and the theoretical focus so far has mainly been on developing a minimax theory over a fixed parameter space. In this paper, we consider adaptive covariance matrix estimation where the goal is to construct a single procedure which is minimax rate optimal simultaneously over each parameter space in a large collection. A fully data-driven block thresholding estimator is proposed. The estimator is constructed by carefully dividing the sample covariance matrix into blocks and then simultaneously estimating the entries…
We consider testing the equality of two high-dimensional covariance matrices by carrying out a multi-level thresholding procedure, which is designed to detect sparse and faint differences between the covariances. A novel U-statistic composition is developed to establish the asymptotic distribution of the thresholding statistics in conjunction with the matrix blocking and the coupling techniques. We propose a multi-thresholding test that is shown to be powerful in detecting sparse and weak differences between two covariance matrices. The test is shown to have attractive detection boundary and t…
Estimating a high-dimensional sparse covariance matrix from a limited number of samples is a fundamental problem in contemporary data analysis. Most proposals to date, however, are not robust to outliers or heavy tails. Towards bridging this gap, in this work we consider estimating a sparse shape matrix from $n$ samples following a possibly heavy tailed elliptical distribution. We propose estimators based on thresholding either Tyler's M-estimator or its regularized variant. We derive bounds on the difference in spectral norm between our estimators and the shape matrix in the joint limit as th…
Covariance function estimation is a fundamental task in multivariate functional data analysis and arises in many applications. In this paper, we consider estimating sparse covariance functions for high-dimensional functional data, where the number of random functions p is comparable to, or even larger than the sample size n. Aided by the Hilbert--Schmidt norm of functions, we introduce a new class of functional thresholding operators that combine functional versions of thresholding and shrinkage, and propose the adaptive functional thresholding estimator by incorporating the variance effects o…
In sparse principal component analysis we are given noisy observations of a low-rank matrix of dimension $n\times p$ and seek to reconstruct it under additional sparsity assumptions. In particular, we assume here each of the principal components $\mathbf{v}_1,\dots,\mathbf{v}_r$ has at most $s_0$ non-zero entries. We are particularly interested in the high dimensional regime wherein $p$ is comparable to, or even much larger than $n$. In an influential paper, \cite{johnstone2004sparse} introduced a simple algorithm that estimates the support of the principal vectors $\mathbf{v}_1,\dots,\mathbf{…
Principal component analysis (PCA) is a classical dimension reduction method which projects data onto the principal subspace spanned by the leading eigenvectors of the covariance matrix. However, it behaves poorly when the number of features p is comparable to, or even much larger than, the sample size n. In this paper, we propose a new iterative thresholding approach for estimating principal subspaces in the setting where the leading eigenvectors are sparse. Under a spiked covariance model, we find that the new approach recovers the principal subspace and leading eigenvectors consistently, an…
Undirected graphs are often used to describe high dimensional distributions. Under sparsity conditions, the graph can be estimated using $\ell_1$-penalization methods. We propose and study the following method. We combine a multiple regression approach with ideas of thresholding and refitting: first we infer a sparse undirected graphical model structure via thresholding of each among many $\ell_1$-norm penalized regression functions; we then estimate the covariance matrix and its inverse using the maximum likelihood estimator. We show that under suitable conditions, this approach yields consis…
Statistical models that possess symmetry arise in diverse settings such as random fields associated to geophysical phenomena, exchangeable processes in Bayesian statistics, and cyclostationary processes in engineering. We formalize the notion of a symmetric model via group invariance. We propose projection onto a group fixed point subspace as a fundamental way of regularizing covariance matrices in the high-dimensional regime. In terms of parameters associated to the group we derive precise rates of convergence of the regularized covariance matrix and demonstrate that significant statistical g…
We derive a formula for optimal hard thresholding of the singular value decomposition in the presence of correlated additive noise; although it nominally involves unobservables, we show how to apply it even where the noise covariance structure is not a-priori known or is not independently estimable. The proposed method, which we call ScreeNOT, is a mathematically solid alternative to Cattell's ever-popular but vague Scree Plot heuristic from 1966. ScreeNOT has a surprising oracle property: it typically achieves exactly, in large finite samples, the lowest possible MSE for matrix recovery, on e…
In an increasing number of applications, it is of interest to recover an approximately low-rank data matrix from noisy observations. This paper develops an unbiased risk estimate---holding in a Gaussian model---for any spectral estimator obeying some mild regularity assumptions. In particular, we give an unbiased risk estimate formula for singular value thresholding (SVT), a popular estimation strategy which applies a soft-thresholding rule to the singular values of the noisy observations. Among other things, our formulas offer a principled and automated way of selecting regularization paramet…
We consider estimation of a sparse parameter vector that determines the covariance matrix of a Gaussian random vector via a sparse expansion into known "basis matrices". Using the theory of reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces, we derive lower bounds on the variance of estimators with a given mean function. This includes unbiased estimation as a special case. We also present a numerical comparison of our lower bounds with the variance of two standard estimators (hard-thresholding estimator and maximum likelihood estimator).
We propose methodology for statistical inference for low-dimensional parameters of sparse precision matrices in a high-dimensional setting. Our method leads to a non-sparse estimator of the precision matrix whose entries have a Gaussian limiting distribution. Asymptotic properties of the novel estimator are analyzed for the case of sub-Gaussian observations under a sparsity assumption on the entries of the true precision matrix and regularity conditions. Thresholding the de-sparsified estimator gives guarantees for edge selection in the associated graphical model. Performance of the proposed m…
We study the estimation of the covariance matrix $Σ$ of a $p$-dimensional normal random vector based on $n$ independent observations corrupted by additive noise. Only a general nonparametric assumption is imposed on the distribution of the noise without any sparsity constraint on its covariance matrix. In this high-dimensional semiparametric deconvolution problem, we propose spectral thresholding estimators that are adaptive to the sparsity of $Σ$. We establish an oracle inequality for these estimators under model miss-specification and derive non-asymptotic minimax convergence rates that are …
High-Dimensional Regularization of the Spatial Sign Covariance Matrix for Robust Shape Estimation
Whiting School of Engineering, Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学惠廷工程学院）；Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学应用数学与统计学系）；Department of Statistics & Data Science Institute, University of Chicago（芝加哥大学统计与数据科学研究所）
We study general singular value shrinkage estimators in high-dimensional regression and classification, when the number of features and the sample size both grow proportionally to infinity. We allow models with general covariance matrices that include a large class of data generating distributions. As far as the implications of our results are concerned, we find exact asymptotic formulas for both the training and test errors in regression models fitted by gradient descent, which provides theoretical insights for early stopping as a regularization method. In addition, we propose a numerical met…
Gaussian Mixture Model with unknown diagonal covariances via continuous sparse regularization
Centrale Lyon, CNRS UMR 5208, Institut Camille Jordan（里昂中央理工学院，法国国家科学研究中心联合研究实验室5208，卡米尔·乔丹研究所）；Institut Universitaire de France (IUF)（法兰西学院）；Univ. Claude Bernard, CNRS UMR 5208, Institut Camille Jordan（克洛德·贝尔纳大学，法国国家科学研究中心联合研究实验室5208，卡米尔·乔丹研究所）
The variance--covariance matrix plays a central role in the inferential theories of high-dimensional factor models in finance and economics. Popular regularization methods of directly exploiting sparsity are not directly applicable to many financial problems. Classical methods of estimating the covariance matrices are based on the strict factor models, assuming independent idiosyncratic components. This assumption, however, is restrictive in practical applications. By assuming sparse error covariance matrix, we allow the presence of the cross-sectional correlation even after taking out common …
Gaussian Processes (GPs) are a popular approach to predict the output of a parameterized experiment. They have many applications in the field of Computer Experiments, in particular to perform sensitivity analysis, adaptive design of experiments and global optimization. Nearly all of the applications of GPs require the inversion of a covariance matrix that, in practice, is often ill-conditioned. Regularization methodologies are then employed with consequences on the GPs that need to be better understood.The two principal methods to deal with ill-conditioned covariance matrices are i) pseudoinve…
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 needed. We first develop a lower bound technique that is particularly well suited for treating "two-directional" problems suc…
This work considers methods for imposing sparsity in Bayesian regression with applications in nonlinear system identification. We first review automatic relevance determination (ARD) and analytically demonstrate the need to additional regularization or thresholding to achieve sparse models. We then discuss two classes of methods, regularization based and thresholding based, which build on ARD to learn parsimonious solutions to linear problems. In the case of orthogonal covariates, we analytically demonstrate favorable performance with regards to learning a small set of active terms in a linear…
Within the framework of statistical learning theory we analyze in detail the so-called elastic-net regularization scheme proposed by Zou and Hastie for the selection of groups of correlated variables. To investigate on the statistical properties of this scheme and in particular on its consistency properties, we set up a suitable mathematical framework. Our setting is random-design regression where we allow the response variable to be vector-valued and we consider prediction functions which are linear combination of elements ({\em features}) in an infinite-dimensional dictionary. Under the assu…
KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）；Leuven Statistics Research Center (LStat)（鲁汶统计研究中心）；Université Paris Descartes（巴黎笛卡尔大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Université Paris-Sud（巴黎南大学）；INRA（法国国家农业研究院）
Gaussian graphical models are widely utilized to infer and visualize networks of dependencies between continuous variables. However, inferring the graph is difficult when the sample size is small compared to the number of variables. To reduce the number of parameters to estimate in the model, we propose a non-asymptotic model selection procedure supported by strong theoretical guarantees based on an oracle inequality and a minimax lower bound. The covariance matrix of the model is approximated by a block-diagonal matrix. The structure of this matrix is detected by thresholding the sample covar…
This paper concerns the problem of matrix completion, which is to estimate a matrix from observations in a small subset of indices. We propose a calibrated spectrum elastic net method with a sum of the nuclear and Frobenius penalties and develop an iterative algorithm to solve the convex minimization problem. The iterative algorithm alternates between imputing the missing entries in the incomplete matrix by the current guess and estimating the matrix by a scaled soft-thresholding singular value decomposition of the imputed matrix until the resulting matrix converges. A calibration step follows…
Centered Gaussian random fields (GRFs) indexed by compacta such as smooth, bounded Euclidean domains or smooth, compact and orientable manifolds are determined by their covariance operators. We consider centered GRFs given as variational solutions to coloring operator equations driven by spatial white noise, with an elliptic self-adjoint pseudodifferential coloring operator from the Hörmander class. This includes the Matérn class of GRFs as a special case. Using biorthogonal multiresolution analyses on the manifold, we prove that the precision and covariance operators, respectively, may be ide…
