This paper considers the problem of testing temporal homogeneity of $p$-dimensional population mean vectors from the repeated measurements of $n$ subjects over $T$ times. To cope with the challenges brought by high-dimensional longitudinal data, we propose a test statistic that takes into account not only the "large $p$, large $T$ and small $n$" situation, but also the complex temporospatial dependence. The asymptotic distribution of the proposed test statistic is established under mild conditions. When the null hypothesis of temporal homogeneity is rejected, we further propose a binary segmentation method shown to be consistent for multiple change-point identification. Simulation studies and an application to fMRI data are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed methods.
Kink model is developed to analyze the data where the regression function is twostage linear but intersects at an unknown threshold. In quantile regression with longitudinal data, previous work assumed that the unknown threshold parameters or kink points are heterogeneous across different quantiles. However, the location where kink effect happens tend to be the same across different quantiles, especially in a region of neighboring quantile levels. Ignoring such homogeneity information may lead to efficiency loss for estimation. In view of this, we propose a composite estimator for the common k…
Statistical inference for large data panels is omnipresent in modern economic applications. An important benefit of panel analysis is the possibility to reduce noise and thus to guarantee stable inference by intersectional pooling. However, it is wellknown that pooling can lead to a biased analysis if individual heterogeneity is too strong. In classical linear panel models, this trade-off concerns the homogeneity of slope parameters, and a large body of tests has been developed to validate this assumption. Yet, such tests can detect inconsiderable deviations from slope homogeneity, discouragin…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Cross-sectional prediction is common in many domains such as healthcare, including forecasting tasks using electronic health records, where different patients form a cross-section. We focus on the task of constructing valid prediction intervals (PIs) in time series regression with a cross-section. A prediction interval is considered valid if it covers the true response with (a pre-specified) high probability. We first distinguish between two notions of validity in such a setting: cross-sectional and longitudinal. Cross-sectional validity is concerned with validity across the cross-section of t…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；MIT（麻省理工学院）
We develop Temporal Quantile Adjustment (TQA), a general method to construct efficient and valid prediction intervals (PIs) for regression on cross-sectional time series data. Such data is common in many domains, including econometrics and healthcare. A canonical example in healthcare is predicting patient outcomes using physiological time-series data, where a population of patients composes a cross-section. Reliable PI estimators in this setting must address two distinct notions of coverage: cross-sectional coverage across a cross-sectional slice, and longitudinal coverage along the temporal …
In cohort studies, non-random medication use can pose barriers to estimation of the natural history trend in a mean biomarker value (namely, the association between a predictor of interest and a biomarker outcome that would be observed in the absence of biomarker-specific treatment). Common causes of treatment and outcomes are often unmeasured, obscuring our ability to easily account for medication use with commonly invoked assumptions such as ignorability. Further, absent some variable satisfying the exclusion restriction, use of instrumental variable approaches may be difficult to justify. H…
We consider inference problems for high-dimensional (HD) functional data with a dense number (T) of repeated measurements taken for a large number of p variables from a small number of n experimental units. The spatial and temporal dependence, high dimensionality, and the dense number of repeated measurements all make theoretical studies and computation challenging. This paper has two aims; our first aim is to solve the theoretical and computational challenges in detecting and identifying change points among covariance matrices from HD functional data. The second aim is to provide computationa…
Multicolor cell spatio-temporal image data have become important to investigate organ development and regeneration, malignant growth or immune responses by tracking different cell types both in vivo and in vitro. Statistical modeling of image data from common longitudinal cell experiments poses significant challenges due to the presence of complex spatio-temporal interactions between different cell types and difficulties related to measurement of single cell trajectories. Current analysis methods focus mainly on univariate cases, often not considering the spatio-temporal effects affecting cell…
As a representation of relational data over time series, longitudinal networks provide opportunities to study link formation processes. However, networks at scale often exhibits community structure (i.e. clustering), which may confound local structural effects if it is not considered appropriately in statistical analysis. To infer the (possibly) evolving clusters and other network structures (e.g. degree distribution and/or transitivity) within each community, simultaneously, we propose a class of statistical models named Temporal Hierarchical Exponential Random Graph Models (THERGM). Our gene…
Longitudinal analysis is important in many disciplines, such as the study of behavioral transitions in social science. Only very recently, feature selection has drawn adequate attention in the context of longitudinal modeling. Standard techniques, such as generalized estimating equations, have been modified to select features by imposing sparsity-inducing regularizers. However, they do not explicitly model how a dependent variable relies on features measured at proximal time points. Recent graphical Granger modeling can select features in lagged time points but ignores the temporal correlation…
Many data sources report related variables of interest that are also referenced over geographic regions and time; however, there are relatively few general statistical methods that one can readily use that incorporate these multivariate spatio-temporal dependencies. Additionally, many multivariate spatio-temporal areal data sets are extremely high dimensional, which leads to practical issues when formulating statistical models. For example, we analyze Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI) published by the US Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) program. QWIs are avail…
Modeling non-linear temporal trajectories is of fundamental interest in many application areas, such as in longitudinal microbiome analysis. Many existing methods focus on estimating mean trajectories, but it is also often of value to assess temporal patterns of individual subjects. Sparse principal components analysis (SFPCA) serves as a useful tool for assessing individual variation in non-linear trajectories; however its application to real data often requires careful model selection criteria and diagnostic tools. Here, we propose a Bayesian approach to SFPCA, which allows users to use the …
Covariate Informed Identification of Heterogeneity and Outliers in Longitudinal Data
University of Louisville（路易斯维尔大学）；Case Western Reserve University（凯斯西储大学）；Mass General Brigham, Harvard Medical School（麻省总医院布里格姆医院，哈佛医学院）；University of Missouri（密苏里大学）
We propose a novel approach to estimate the Cox model with temporal covariates. Our new approach treats the temporal covariates as arising from a longitudinal process which is modeled jointly with the event time. Different from the literature, the longitudinal process in our model is specified as a bounded variational process and determined by a family of Initial Value Problems associated with an Ordinary Differential Equation. Our specification has the advantage that only the observation of the temporal covariates at the time to event and the time to event itself are required to fit the model…
The estimation of voting blocs is an important statistical inquiry in political science. However, the scope of these analyses is usually restricted to roll call data where individual votes are directly observed. Here, we examine a Bayesian mixture model with Dirichlet-multinomial components to infer voting blocs within longitudinal referendum data aggregated at the municipal level. As a case study, we analyze vote totals from 423 municipalities in the US state Maine for 54 referendum questions balloted from 2008-2019. Using this model, we recover the posterior distribution on the number of vot…
Longitudinal item response data are common in social science, educational science, and psychology, among other disciplines. Studying the time-varying relationships between items is crucial for educational assessment or designing marketing strategies from survey questions. Although dynamic network models have been widely developed, we cannot apply them directly to item response data because there are multiple systems of nodes with various types of local interactions among items, resulting in multiplex network structures. We propose a new model to study these temporal interactions among items by…
