The problem of adaptive multivariate function estimation in the single-index regression model with random design and weak assumptions on the noise is investigated. A novel estimation procedure that adapts simultaneously to the unknown index vector and the smoothness of the link function by selecting from a family of specific kernel estimators is proposed. We establish a pointwise oracle inequality which, in its turn, is used to judge the quality of estimating the entire function (``global'' oracle inequality). Both the results are applied to the problems of pointwise and global adaptive estimation over a collection of Hölder and Nikol'skii functional classes, respectively.
In this paper, based on the kernel estimator proposed by Ould-Said and Lemdani (Ann. Instit. Statist. Math. 2006), we develop some new generalized M-estimator procedures for single index regression models with left-truncated responses. The consistency and asymptotic normality of our estimators are also established. Some simulation studies are given to investigate the finite sample performance of the proposed estimators.
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 some new generalizations of M-estimation procedures for single-index regression models in presence of randomly right-censored responses. We derive consistency and asymptotic normality of our estimates. The results are proved in order to be adapted to a wide range of techniques used in a censored regression framework (e.g. synthetic data or weighted least squares). As in the uncensored case, the estimator of the single-index parameter is seen to have the same asymptotic behavior as in a fully parametric scheme. We compare these new estimators with those based on the …
The paper deals with asymptotic properties of the adaptive procedure proposed in the author paper (2007) for estimation of unknown nonparametric regression. We prove that this procedure is asymptotically efficient for a quadratic risk. It means that the asymptotic quadratic risk for this procedure coincides with a sharp lower bound.
We propose a class of weighted least squares estimators for the tail index of a distribution function with a regularly varying upper tail. Our approach is based on the method developed by \cite{Holan2010} for the Parzen tail index. Asymptotic normality of the estimators is proved. Through a simulation study, these and earlier estimators are compared in the Pareto and Hall models using the mean squared error as criterion. The results show that the weighted least squares estimator is better than the other estimators investigated.
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…
Motivated by finance and technical applications, the objective of this paper is to consider adaptive estimation of regression and density distribution based on Fourier-Legendre expansion, and construction of confidence intervals - also adaptive. The estimators are asymptotically optimal and adaptive in the sense that they can adapt to unknown smoothness.
This paper considers quantile model with grouped explanatory variables. In order to have the sparsity of the parameter groups but also the sparsity between two successive groups of variables, we propose and study an adaptive fused group LASSO quantile estimator. The number of variable groups can be fixed or divergent. We find the convergence rate under classical assumptions and we show that the proposed estimator satisfies the oracle properties.
We consider the problem of inference on a regression function at a point when the entire function satisfies a sign or shape restriction under the null. We propose a test that achieves the optimal minimax rate adaptively over a range of Hölder classes, up to a $\log\log n$ term, which we show to be necessary for adaptation. We apply the results to adaptive one-sided tests for the regression discontinuity parameter under a monotonicity restriction, the value of a monotone regression function at the boundary and the proportion of true null hypotheses in a multiple testing problem.
A nonparametric procedure for robust regression estimation and for quantile regression is proposed which is completely data-driven and adapts locally to the regularity of the regression function. This is achieved by considering in each point M-estimators over different local neighbourhoods and by a local model selection procedure based on sequential testing. Non-asymptotic risk bounds are obtained, which yield rate-optimality for large sample asymptotics under weak conditions. Simulations for different univariate median regression models show good finite sample properties, also in comparison t…
This paper deals with estimation with functional covariates. More precisely, we aim at estimating the regression function $m$ of a continuous outcome $Y$ against a standard Wiener coprocess $W$. Following Cadre and Truquet (2015) and Cadre, Klutchnikoff, and Massiot (2017) the Wiener-Itô decomposition of $m(W)$ is used to construct a family of estimators. The minimax rate of convergence over specific smoothness classes is obtained. A data-driven selection procedure is defined following the ideas developed by Goldenshluger and Lepski (2011). An oracle-type inequality is obtained which leads to …
Statistical learning evolves quickly with more and more sophisticated models proposed to incorporate the complicated data structure from modern scientific and business problems. Varying index coefficient models extend varying coefficient models and single index models, becoming the latest state-of-the-art for semiparametric regression. This new class of models offers greater flexibility to characterize complicated nonlinear interaction effects in regression analysis. To safeguard against outliers and extreme observations, we consider a robust quantile regression approach to estimate the model …
We propose a general adaptive LASSO method for a quantile regression model. Our method is very interesting when we know nothing about the first two moments of the model error. We first prove that the obtained estimators satisfy the oracle properties, which involves the relevant variable selection without using hypothesis test. Next, we study the proposed method when the (multiphase) model changes to unknown observations called change-points. Convergence rates of the change-points and of the regression parameters estimators in each phase are found. The sparsity of the adaptive LASSO quantile es…
In the nonparametric regression setting, we construct an estimator which is a continuous function interpolating the data points with high probability, while attaining minimax optimal rates under mean squared risk on the scale of Hölder classes adaptively to the unknown smoothness.
The paper continues the authors' work on the adaptive Wynn algorithm in a nonlinear regression model. In the present paper it is shown that if the mean response function satisfies a condition of `saturated identifiability', which was introduced by Pronzato \cite{Pronzato}, then the adaptive least squares estimators are strongly consistent. The condition states that the regression parameter is identifiable under any saturated design, i.e., the values of the mean response function at any $p$ distinct design points determine the parameter point uniquely where, typically, $p$ is the dimension of t…
Stochastic simulators such as Monte-Carlo estimators are widely used in science and engineering to study physical systems through their probabilistic representation. Global sensitivity analysis aims to identify the input parameters which have the most important impact on the output. A popular tool to perform global sensitivity analysis is the variance-based method which comes from the Hoeffding-Sobol decomposition. Nevertheless, this method requires an important number of simulations and is often unfeasible under reasonable time constraint. Therefore, an approximation of the input/output relat…
Estimating the tail index parameter is one of the primal objectives in extreme value theory. For heavy-tailed distributions the Hill estimator is the most popular way to estimate the tail index parameter. Improving the Hill estimator was aimed by recent works with different methods, for example by using bootstrap, or Kolmogorov-Smirnov metric. These methods are asymptotically consistent, but for tail index $ξ>1$ and smaller sample sizes the estimation fails to approach the theoretical value for realistic sample sizes. In this paper, we introduce a new empirical method, which can estimate high …
We consider the problem of adaptive inference on a regression function at a point under a multivariate nonparametric regression setting. The regression function belongs to a Hölder class and is assumed to be monotone with respect to some or all of the arguments. We derive the minimax rate of convergence for confidence intervals (CIs) that adapt to the underlying smoothness, and provide an adaptive inference procedure that obtains this minimax rate. The procedure differs from that of Cai and Low (2004), intended to yield shorter CIs under practically relevant specifications. The proposed method…
Adaptive confidence intervals for regression functions are constructed under shape constraints of monotonicity and convexity. A natural benchmark is established for the minimum expected length of confidence intervals at a given function in terms of an analytic quantity, the local modulus of continuity. This bound depends not only on the function but also the assumed function class. These benchmarks show that the constructed confidence intervals have near minimum expected length for each individual function, while maintaining a given coverage probability for functions within the class. Such ada…
The multi-index model is a simple yet powerful high-dimensional regression model which circumvents the curse of dimensionality assuming $ \mathbb{E} [ Y | X ] = g(A^\top X) $ for some unknown index space $A$ and link function $g$. In this paper we introduce a method for the estimation of the index space, and study the propagation error of an index space estimate in the regression of the link function. The proposed method approximates the index space by the span of linear regression slope coefficients computed over level sets of the data. Being based on ordinary least squares, our approach is e…
This paper deals with the nonparametric estimation in heteroscedastic regression $ Y_i=f(X_i)+ξ_i, \: i=1,...,n $, with incomplete information, i.e. each real random variable $ ξ_i $ has a density $ g_{i} $ which is unknown to the statistician. The aim is to estimate the regression function $ f $ at a given point. Using a local polynomial fitting from M-estimator denoted $ \hat f^h $ and applying Lepski's procedure for the bandwidth selection, we construct an estimator $ \hat f^{\hat h} $ which is adaptive over the collection of isotropic Hölder classes. In particular, we establish new exponen…
In this article, we consider the problem of estimating the index parameter $α_0$ in the single index model $E[Y |X] = f_0(α_0^T X)$ with $f_0$ the unknown ridge function defined on $\mathbb{R}$, $X$ a d-dimensional covariate and $Y$ the response. We show that when $X$ is Gaussian, then $α_0$ can be consistently estimated by regressing the observed responses $Y_i$, $i = 1, . . ., n$ on the covariates $X_1, . . ., X_n$ after centering and rescaling. The method works without any additional smoothness assumptions on $f_0$ and only requires that $cov(f_0(α_0^T X),α_0^TX) \neq 0$, which is always sa…
k Nearest Neighbor (kNN) method is a simple and popular statistical method for classification and regression. For both classification and regression problems, existing works have shown that, if the distribution of the feature vector has bounded support and the probability density function is bounded away from zero in its support, the convergence rate of the standard kNN method, in which k is the same for all test samples, is minimax optimal. On the contrary, if the distribution has unbounded support, we show that there is a gap between the convergence rate achieved by the standard kNN method a…
Weak consistency and asymptotic normality of the ordinary least-squares estimator in a linear regression with adaptive learning is derived when the crucial, so-called, `gain' parameter is estimated in a first step by nonlinear least squares from an auxiliary model. The singular limiting distribution of the two-step estimator is normal and in general affected by the sampling uncertainty from the first step. However, this `generated-regressor' issue disappears for certain parameter combinations.
We propose an adaptive confidence interval procedure (CIP) for the coefficients in the normal linear regression model. This procedure has a frequentist coverage rate that is constant as a function of the model parameters, yet provides smaller intervals than the usual interval procedure, on average across regression coefficients. The proposed procedure is obtained by defining a class of CIPs that all have exact $1-α$ frequentist coverage, and then selecting from this class the procedure that minimizes a prior expected interval width. Such a procedure may be described as "frequentist, assisted b…
Estimating the structures at high or low quantiles has become an important subject and attracted increasing attention across numerous fields. However, due to data sparsity at tails, it usually is a challenging task to obtain reliable estimation, especially for high-dimensional data. This paper suggests a flexible parametric structure to tails, and this enables us to conduct the estimation at quantile levels with rich observations and then to extrapolate the fitted structures to far tails. The proposed model depends on some quantile indices and hence is called the quantile index regression. Mor…
We develop adaptive estimation and inference methods for high-dimensional Gaussian copula regression that achieve the same performance without the knowledge of the marginal transformations as that for high-dimensional linear regression. Using a Kendall's tau based covariance matrix estimator, an $\ell_1$ regularized estimator is proposed and a corresponding de-biased estimator is developed for the construction of the confidence intervals and hypothesis tests. Theoretical properties of the procedures are studied and the proposed estimation and inference methods are shown to be adaptive to the u…
Heteroscedasticity testing is of importance in regression analysis. Existing local smoothing tests suffer severely from curse of dimensionality even when the number of covariates is moderate because of use of nonparametric estimation. In this paper, a dimension reduction-based model adaptive test is proposed which behaves like a local smoothing test as if the number of covariates were equal to the number of their linear combinations in the mean regression function, in particular, equal to 1 when the mean function contains a single index. The test statistic is asymptotically normal under the nu…
The problem of error density estimation for a functional single index model with dependent errors is studied. A Bayesian method is utilized to simultaneously estimate the bandwidths in the kernel-form error density and regression function, under an autoregressive error structure. For estimating both the regression function and error density, empirical studies show that the functional single index model gives improved estimation and prediction accuracies than any nonparametric functional regression considered. Furthermore, estimation of error density facilitates the construction of prediction i…
Over-parameterization and adaptive methods have played a crucial role in the success of deep learning in the last decade. The widespread use of over-parameterization has forced us to rethink generalization by bringing forth new phenomena, such as implicit regularization of optimization algorithms and double descent with training progression. A series of recent works have started to shed light on these areas in the quest to understand -- why do neural networks generalize well? The setting of over-parameterized linear regression has provided key insights into understanding this mysterious behavi…
Quantile regression has become a valuable tool to analyze heterogeneous covaraite-response associations that are often encountered in practice. The development of quantile regression methodology for high-dimensional covariates primarily focuses on examination of model sparsity at a single or multiple quantile levels, which are typically pre-specified ad hoc by the users. The resulting models may be sensitive to the specific choices of the quantile levels, leading to difficulties in interpretation and erosion of confidence in the results. In this article, we propose a new penalization framework…
We introduce an original method of multidimensional ridge penalization in functional local linear regressions. The nonparametric regression of functional data is extended from its multivariate counterpart, and is known to be sensitive to the choice of $J$, where $J$ is the dimension of the projection subspace of the data. Under multivariate setting, a roughness penalty is helpful for variance reduction. However, among the limited works covering roughness penalty under the functional setting, most only use a single scalar for tuning. Our new approach proposes a class of data-adaptive ridge pena…
A longstanding problem of existing empirical process-based tests for regressions is that when the number of covariates is greater than one, they either have no tractable limiting null distributions or are not omnibus. To attack this problem, we in this paper propose a projection-based adaptive-to-model approach. When the hypothetical model is parametric single-index, the method can fully utilize the dimension reduction model structure under the null hypothesis as if the covariate were one-dimensional such that the martingale transformation-based test can be asymptotically distribution-free. Fu…
Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）；Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院理论物理研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；MinJiang University（闽江学院）
High-dimensional linear regression model is the most popular statistical model for high-dimensional data, but it is quite a challenging task to achieve a sparse set of regression coefficients. In this paper, we propose a simple heuristic algorithm to construct sparse high-dimensional linear regression models, which is adapted from the shortest solution-guided decimation algorithm and is referred to as ASSD. This algorithm constructs the support of regression coefficients under the guidance of the least-squares solution of the recursively decimated linear equations, and it applies an early-stop…
In linear regression, the least squares (LS) estimator has certain optimality properties if the errors are normally distributed. This assumption is often violated in practice, partly caused by data outliers. Robust estimators can cope with this situation and thus they are widely used in practice. One example of robust estimators for regression are adaptive modified maximum likelihood (AMML) estimators (Donmez, 2010). However, they are not robust to $x$ outliers, so-called leverage points. In this study, we propose a new regression estimator by employing an appropriate weighting scheme in the A…
Laval University（拉瓦尔大学）；INRIA（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）
We consider the problem of streaming kernel regression, when the observations arrive sequentially and the goal is to recover the underlying mean function, assumed to belong to an RKHS. The variance of the noise is not assumed to be known. In this context, we tackle the problem of tuning the regularization parameter adaptively at each time step, while maintaining tight confidence bounds estimates on the value of the mean function at each point. To this end, we first generalize existing results for finite-dimensional linear regression with fixed regularization and known variance to the kernel se…
In this note, we consider the problem of existence of adaptive confidence bands in the fixed design regression model, adapting ideas in Hoffmann and Nickl (2011) to the present case. In the course of the proof, we show that sup-norm adaptive estimators exist as well in regression.
We show that under a linearity condition on the distribution of the predictors, the coefficient in single-index regression can be estimated with the same efficiency as in the case when the link function is known. Thus, the linearity condition seems to substitute for knowing the exact conditional distribution of the response given the linear combinations of the predictors.
The single-index model is a statistical model for intrinsic regression where responses are assumed to depend on a single yet unknown linear combination of the predictors, allowing to express the regression function as $ \mathbb{E} [ Y | X ] = f ( \langle v , X \rangle ) $ for some unknown \emph{index} vector $v$ and \emph{link} function $f$. Conditional methods provide a simple and effective approach to estimate $v$ by averaging moments of $X$ conditioned on $Y$, but depend on parameters whose optimal choice is unknown and do not provide generalization bounds on $f$. In this paper we propose a…
We construct confidence sets for the regression function in nonparametric binary regression with an unknown design density. These confidence sets are adaptive in $L^2$ loss over a continuous class of Sobolev type spaces. Adaptation holds in the smoothness of the regression function, over the maximal parameter spaces where adaptation is possible, provided the design density is smooth enough. We identify two key regimes --- one where adaptation is possible, and one where some critical regions must be removed. We address related questions about goodness of fit testing and adaptive estimation of r…
The paper deals with asymptotic properties of the adaptive procedure proposed in the author paper, 2007, for estimating a unknown nonparametric regression. We prove that this procedure is asymptotically efficient for a quadratic risk, i.e. the asymptotic quadratic risk for this procedure coincides with the Pinsker constant which gives a sharp lower bound for the quadratic risk over all possible estimators.
While adaptive sensing has provided improved rates of convergence in sparse regression and classification, results in nonparametric regression have so far been restricted to quite specific classes of functions. In this paper, we describe an adaptive-sensing algorithm which is applicable to general nonparametric-regression problems. The algorithm is spatially adaptive, and achieves improved rates of convergence over spatially inhomogeneous functions. Over standard function classes, it likewise retains the spatial adaptivity properties of a uniform design.
A $d$-dimensional nonparametric additive regression model with dependent observations is considered. Using the marginal integration technique and wavelets methodology, we develop a new adaptive estimator for a component of the additive regression function. Its asymptotic properties are investigated via the minimax approach under the $\mathbb{L}_2$ risk over Besov balls. We prove that it attains a sharp rate of convergence which turns to be the one obtained in the $\iid$ case for the standard univariate regression estimation problem.
