Many popular robust estimators are $U$-quantiles, most notably the Hodges-Lehmann location estimator and the $Q_n$ scale estimator. We prove a functional central limit theorem for the sequential $U$-quantile process without any moment assumptions and under weak short-range dependence conditions. We further devise an estimator for the long-run variance and show its consistency, from which the convergence of the studentized version of the sequential $U$-quantile process to a standard Brownian motion follows. This result can be used to construct CUSUM-type change-point tests based on $U$-quantiles, which do not rely on bootstrapping procedures. We demonstrate this approach in detail at the example of the Hodges-Lehmann estimator for robustly detecting changes in the central location. A simulation study confirms the very good robustness and efficiency properties of the test. Two real-life data sets are analyzed.
Efron [J. Roy. Statist. Soc. Ser. B 54 (1992) 83--111] proposed a computationally efficient method, called the jackknife-after-bootstrap, for estimating the variance of a bootstrap estimator for independent data. For dependent data, a version of the jackknife-after-bootstrap method has been recently proposed by Lahiri [Econometric Theory 18 (2002) 79--98]. In this paper it is shown that the jackknife-after-bootstrap estimators of the variance of a bootstrap quantile are consistent for both dependent and independent data. Results from a simulation study are also presented.
CLT and Edgeworth Expansion for m-out-of-n Bootstrap Estimators of The Studentized Median
Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Science Northwestern University（工业工程与管理科学系西北大学）；Department of Computer Science Northwestern University（计算机科学系西北大学）
In this paper, we derive the joint asymptotic distributions of functions of quantile estimators (the non-parametric sample quantile and the parametric location-scale quantile estimator) with functions of measure of dispersion estimators (the sample variance, sample mean absolute deviation, sample median absolute deviation) - assuming an underlying identically and independently distributed sample. We also discuss the conditions required by the use of such estimators. Further, we show that these results can be extended to any higher order absolute central sample moment as measure of dispersion. …
Hypothesis tests in models whose dimension far exceeds the sample size can be formulated much like the classical studentized tests only after the initial bias of estimation is removed successfully. The theory of debiased estimators can be developed in the context of quantile regression models for a fixed quantile value. However, it is frequently desirable to formulate tests based on the quantile regression process, as this leads to more robust tests and more stable confidence sets. Additionally, inference in quantile regression requires estimation of the so called sparsity function, which depe…
Motivated by applications in biological science, we propose a novel test to assess the conditional mean dependence of a response variable on a large number of covariates. Our procedure is built on the martingale difference divergence recently proposed in Shao and Zhang (2014), and it is able to detect a certain type of departure from the null hypothesis of conditional mean independence without making any specific model assumptions. Theoretically, we establish the asymptotic normality of the proposed test statistic under suitable assumption on the eigenvalues of a Hermitian operator, which is c…
We establish the validity of the empirical Edgeworth expansion (EE) for a studentized trimmed mean, under the sole condition that the underlying distribution function of the observations satisfies a local smoothness condition near the two quantiles where the trimming occurs. A simple explicit formula for the N^{-1/2} term (correcting for skewness and bias; N being the sample size) of the EE is given. In particular our result supplements previous work by P. Hall and A.R. Padmanabhan, On the bootstrap and the trimmed mean}, J. of Multivariate Analysis, v. 41 (1992), pp. 132-153. and H. Putter an…
We establish a general theory of optimality for block bootstrap distribution estimation for sample quantiles under a mild strong mixing assumption. In contrast to existing results, we study the block bootstrap for varying numbers of blocks. This corresponds to a hybrid between the subsampling bootstrap and the moving block bootstrap (MBB), in which the number of blocks is somewhere between 1 and the ratio of sample size to block length. Our main theorem determines the optimal choice of the number of blocks and block length to achieve the best possible convergence rate for the block bootstrap d…
We consider quantile regression processes from censored data under dependent data structures and derive a uniform Bahadur representation for those processes. We also consider cases where the dimension of the parameter in the quantile regression model is large. It is demonstrated that traditional penalized estimators such as the adaptive lasso yield sub-optimal rates if the coefficients of the quantile regression cross zero. New penalization techniques are introduced which are able to deal with specific problems of censored data and yield estimates with an optimal rate. In contrast to most of t…
We consider estimation of quantile curves for a general class of nonstationary processes. Consistency and central limit results are obtained for local linear quantile estimates under a mild short-range dependence condition. Our results are applied to environmental data sets. In particular, our results can be used to address the problem of whether climate variability has changed, an important problem raised by IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) in 2001.
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, …
We will show under very weak conditions on differentiability and dependence that the central limit theorem for quantiles holds and that the block bootstrap is weakly consistent. Under slightly stronger conditions, the bootstrap is strongly consistent. Without the differentiability condition, quantiles might have a non-normal asymptotic distribution and the bootstrap might fail.
"Spatial" or "geometric" quantiles are the only multivariate quantiles coping with both high-dimensional data and functional data, also in the framework of multiple-output quantile regression. This work studies spatial quantiles in the finite-dimensional case, where the spatial quantile $μ_{α,u}(P)$ of the distribution $P$ taking values in $\mathbb{R}^d $ is a point in $\mathbb{R}^d$ indexed by an order $α\in[0,1)$ and a direction $u$ in the unit sphere $\mathcal{S}^{d-1}$ of $\mathbb{R}^d$ --- or equivalently by a vector $αu$ in the open unit ball of $\mathbb{R}^d$. Recently, Girard and Stupf…
The Yule-Simpson paradox notes that an association between random variables can be reversed when averaged over a background variable. Cox and Wermuth (2003) introduced the concept of distribution dependence between two random variables X and Y, and developed two dependence conditions, each of which guarantees that reversal cannot occur. Ma, Xie and Geng (2006) studied the collapsibility of distribution dependence over a background variable W, under a rather strong homogeneity condition. Collapsibility ensures the association remains the same for conditional and marginal models, so that Yule-Si…
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…
In this paper, we derive valid Edgeworth expansions for studentized versions of a large class of statistics when the data are generated by a strongly mixing process. Under dependence, the asymptotic variance of such a statistic is given by an infinite series of lag-covariances, and therefore, studentizing factors (i.e., estimators of the asymptotic standard error) typically involve an increasing number, say, $\ell$ of lag-covariance estimators, which are themselves quadratic functions of the observations. The unboundedness of the dimension $\ell$ of these quadratic functions makes the derivati…
Quantile regression has been advocated in survival analysis to assess evolving covariate effects. However, challenges arise when the censoring time is not always observed and may be covariate-dependent, particularly in the presence of continuously-distributed covariates. In spite of several recent advances, existing methods either involve algorithmic complications or impose a probability grid. The former leads to difficulties in the implementation and asymptotics, whereas the latter introduces undesirable grid dependence. To resolve these issues, we develop fundamental and general quantile cal…
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…
We propose two types of Quantile Graphical Models (QGMs) --- Conditional Independence Quantile Graphical Models (CIQGMs) and Prediction Quantile Graphical Models (PQGMs). CIQGMs characterize the conditional independence of distributions by evaluating the distributional dependence structure at each quantile index. As such, CIQGMs can be used for validation of the graph structure in the causal graphical models (\cite{pearl2009causality, robins1986new, heckman2015causal}). One main advantage of these models is that we can apply them to large collections of variables driven by non-Gaussian and non…
Fundamentals of non-parametric statistical inference for integrated quantiles
Saint Petersburg State University（圣彼得堡国立大学）；Emperor Alexander I Saint Petersburg State Transport University（亚历山大一世圣彼得堡国立交通大学）；Western University（韦仕敦大学）
We propose a new measure related with tail dependence in terms of correlation: quantile correlation coefficient of random variables X, Y. The quantile correlation is defined by the geometric mean of two quantile regression slopes of X on Y and Y on X in the same way that the Pearson correlation is related with the regression coefficients of Y on X and X on Y. The degree of tail dependent association in X, Y, if any, is well reflected in the quantile correlation. The quantile correlation makes it possible to measure sensitivity of a conditional quantile of a random variable with respect to chan…
Quantile regression is a tool for learning conditional distributions. In this paper we study quantile regression in the setting where a protected attribute is unavailable when fitting the model. This can lead to "unfair'' quantile estimators for which the effective quantiles are very different for the subpopulations defined by the protected attribute. We propose a procedure for adjusting the estimator on a heldout sample where the protected attribute is available. The main result of the paper is an empirical process analysis showing that the adjustment leads to a fair estimator for which the t…
Quantile- and copula-related spectral concepts recently have been considered by various authors. Those spectra, in their most general form, provide a full characterization of the copulas associated with the pairs $(X_t,X_{t-k})$ in a process $(X_t)_{t\in\mathbb{Z}}$, and account for important dynamic features, such as changes in the conditional shape (skewness, kurtosis), time-irreversibility, or dependence in the extremes that their traditional counterparts cannot capture. Despite various proposals for estimation strategies, only quite incomplete asymptotic distributional results are availabl…
Let $\{X_i\}_{i=-\infty}^{\infty}$ be a sequence of random vectors and $Y_{in}=f_{in}(\mathcal{X}_{i,\ell})$ be zero mean block-variables where $\mathcal{X}_{i,\ell}=(X_i,...,X_{i+\ell-1}),i\geq 1$, are overlapping blocks of length $\ell$ and where $f_{in}$ are Borel measurable functions. This paper establishes valid joint asymptotic expansions of general orders for the joint distribution of the sums $\sum_{i=1}^nX_i$ and $\sum_{i=1}^nY_{in}$ under weak dependence conditions on the sequence $\{X_i\}_{i=-\infty}^{\infty}$ when the block length $\ell$ grows to infinity. In contrast to the classi…
We propose a test for model specification of a parametric diffusion process based on a kernel estimation of the transitional density of the process. The empirical likelihood is used to formulate a statistic, for each kernel smoothing bandwidth, which is effectively a Studentized $L_2$-distance between the kernel transitional density estimator and the parametric transitional density implied by the parametric process. To reduce the sensitivity of the test on smoothing bandwidth choice, the final test statistic is constructed by combining the empirical likelihood statistics over a set of smoothin…
This paper investigates pooling strategies for tail index and extreme quantile estimation from heavy-tailed data. To fully exploit the information contained in several samples, we present general weighted pooled Hill estimators of the tail index and weighted pooled Weissman estimators of extreme quantiles calculated through a nonstandard geometric averaging scheme. We develop their large-sample asymptotic theory across a fixed number of samples, covering the general framework of heterogeneous sample sizes with different and asymptotically dependent distributions. Our results include optimal ch…
We focus on the problem estimating a monotone trend function under additive and dependent noise. New point-wise confidence interval estimators under both short- and long-range dependent errors are introduced and studied. These intervals are obtained via the method of inversion of certain discrepancy statistics arising in hypothesis testing problems. The advantage of this approach is that it avoids the estimation of nuisance parameters such as the derivative of the unknown function, which existing methods are forced to deal with. While the methodology is motivated by earlier work in the indepen…
Linear quantile regression is a powerful tool to investigate how predictors may affect a response heterogeneously across different quantile levels. Unfortunately, existing approaches find it extremely difficult to adjust for any dependency between observation units, largely because such methods are not based upon a fully generative model of the data. For analyzing spatially indexed data, we address this difficulty by generalizing the joint quantile regression model of Yang and Tokdar (2017) and characterizing spatial dependence via a Gaussian or $t$ copula process on the underlying quantile le…
The presence of \b{eta}-convergence in European regions is an important issue to be analyzed. In this paper, we adopt a quantile regression approach in analyzing economic convergence. While previous work has performed quantile regression at the national level, we focus on 187 European NUTS2 regions for the period 1981-2009 and use spatial quantile regression to account for spatial dependence.
Longitudinal data are characterized by the dependence between observations coming from the same individual. In a regression perspective, such a dependence can be usefully ascribed to unobserved features (covariates) specific to each individual. On these grounds, random parameter models with time-constant or time-varying structure are well established in the generalized linear model context. In the quantile regression framework, specifications based on random parameters have only recently known a flowering interest. We start from the recent proposal by Farcomeni (2012) on longitudinal quantile …
We propose a M-quantile regression model for the analysis of multivariate, continuous, longitudinal data. M-quantile regression represents an appealing alternative to standard regression models, as it combines the robustness of quantile and the efficiency of expectile regression, providing a complete picture of the response variable distribution. Discrete, individual-specific, random parameters are used to account for both dependence within the same response recorded at different times and association between different responses observed on the same sample unit at a given time. A suitable para…
Linear quantile regression models aim at providing a detailed and robust picture of the (conditional) response distribution as function of a set of observed covariates. Longitudinal data represent an interesting field of application of such models; due to their peculiar features, they represent a substantial challenge, in that the standard, cross-sectional, model representation needs to be extended for dealing with such kind of data. In fact, repeated observations from the same statistical unit poses a problem of dependence; in a conditional perspective, this dependence could be ascribed to so…
Unconditional quantile regression (UQR) attracts attention in various fields to investigate the impacts of explanatory variables on quantiles of the marginal distribution of an explained variable. This study attempts to introduce spatial dependence into the UQR within the framework of random effects eigenvector spatial filtering, resulting in the model that we term the spatially filtered UQR (SF-UQR). We then develop a computationally efficient approach for SF-UQR estimation. Finally, the performance of the SF-UQR is tested with a hedonic land price model for the Tokyo metropolitan area. SF-UQ…
Quantile regression, the prediction of conditional quantiles, finds applications in various fields. Often, some or all of the variables are discrete. The authors propose two new quantile regression approaches to handle such mixed discrete-continuous data. Both of them generalize the continuous D-vine quantile regression, where the dependence between the response and the covariates is modeled by a parametric D-vine. D-vine quantile regression provides very flexible models, that enable accurate and fast predictions. Moreover, it automatically takes care of major issues of classical quantile regr…
In this paper, a new estimation method is introduced for the quantile spectrum, which uses a parametric form of the autoregressive (AR) spectrum coupled with nonparametric smoothing. The method begins with quantile periodograms which are constructed by trigonometric quantile regression at different quantile levels, to represent the serial dependence of time series at various quantiles. At each quantile level, we approximate the quantile spectrum by a function in the form of an ordinary AR spectrum. In this model, we first compute what we call the quantile autocovariance function (QACF) by the …
Spatial dependent data frequently occur in many fields such as spatial econometrics and epidemiology. To deal with the dependence of variables and estimate quantile-specific effects by covariates, spatial quantile autoregressive models (SQAR models) are introduced. Conventional quantile regression only focuses on the fitting models but ignores the examination of multiple conditional quantile functions, which provides a comprehensive view of the relationship between the response and covariates. Thus, it is necessary to study the different regression slopes at different quantiles, especially in …
Quantile regression is a field with steadily growing importance in statistical modeling. It is a complementary method to linear regression, since computing a range of conditional quantile functions provides a more accurate modelling of the stochastic relationship among variables, especially in the tails. We introduce a non-restrictive and highly flexible nonparametric quantile regression approach based on C- and D-vine copulas. Vine copulas allow for separate modeling of marginal distributions and the dependence structure in the data, and can be expressed through a graph theoretical model give…
Extreme quantile regression provides estimates of conditional quantiles outside the range of the data. Classical quantile regression performs poorly in such cases since data in the tail region are too scarce. Extreme value theory is used for extrapolation beyond the range of observed values and estimation of conditional extreme quantiles. Based on the peaks-over-threshold approach, the conditional distribution above a high threshold is approximated by a generalized Pareto distribution with covariate dependent parameters. We propose a gradient boosting procedure to estimate a conditional genera…
We propose a new method for estimating the extreme quantiles for a function of several dependent random variables. In contrast to the conventional approach based on extreme value theory, we do not impose the condition that the tail of the underlying distribution admits an approximate parametric form, and, furthermore, our estimation makes use of the full observed data. The proposed method is semiparametric as no parametric forms are assumed on all the marginal distributions. But we select appropriate bivariate copulas to model the joint dependence structure by taking the advantage of the recen…
The present article is devoted to the semi-parametric estimation of multivariate expectiles for extreme levels. The considered multivariate risk measures also include the possible conditioning with respect to a functional covariate, belonging to an infinite-dimensional space. By using the first order optimality condition, we interpret these expectiles as solutions of a multidimensional nonlinear optimum problem. Then the inference is based on a minimization algorithm of gradient descent type, coupled with consistent kernel estimations of our key statistical quantities such as conditional quant…
This paper considers estimating functional-coefficient models in panel quantile regression with individual effects, allowing the cross-sectional and temporal dependence for large panel observations. A latent group structure is imposed on the heterogenous quantile regression models so that the number of nonparametric functional coefficients to be estimated can be reduced considerably. With the preliminary local linear quantile estimates of the subject-specific functional coefficients, a classic agglomerative clustering algorithm is used to estimate the unknown group structure and an easy-to-imp…
The statistical theory of extremes is extended to observations that are non-stationary and not independent. The non-stationarity over time and space is controlled via the scedasis (tail scale) in the marginal distributions. Spatial dependence stems from multivariate extreme value theory. We establish asymptotic theory for both the weighted sequential tail empirical process and the weighted tail quantile process based on all observations, taken over time and space. The results yield two statistical tests for homoscedasticity in the tail, one in space and one in time. Further, we show that the c…
In this paper, we introduce the weighted-average quantile regression framework, $\int_0^1 q_{Y|X}(u)ψ(u)du = X'β$, where $Y$ is a dependent variable, $X$ is a vector of covariates, $q_{Y|X}$ is the quantile function of the conditional distribution of $Y$ given $X$, $ψ$ is a weighting function, and $β$ is a vector of parameters. We argue that this framework is of interest in many applied settings and develop an estimator of the vector of parameters $β$. We show that our estimator is $\sqrt T$-consistent and asymptotically normal with mean zero and easily estimable covariance matrix, where $T$ i…
This paper considers the regional estimation of high quantiles of annual maximal river flow distributions $F$, an important problem from flood frequency analysis. Even though this particular problem has been addressed by many papers, less attention has been payed to incorporating seasonal variability and spatial dependence into the methods. We are going to discuss two regional estimators of high quantiles of local distributions $F$ that are able to deal with these important features, namely, a parametric approach based on so-called two-component extreme value distributions and a semi-parametri…
