In this paper, we propose a bootstrap method applied to massive data processed distributedly in a large number of machines. This new method is computationally efficient in that we bootstrap on the master machine without over-resampling, typically required by existing methods \cite{kleiner2014scalable,sengupta2016subsampled}, while provably achieving optimal statistical efficiency with minimal communication. Our method does not require repeatedly re-fitting the model but only applies multiplier bootstrap in the master machine on the gradients received from the worker machines. Simulations validate our theory.
In distributed, or privacy-preserving learning, we are often given a set of probabilistic models estimated from different local repositories, and asked to combine them into a single model that gives efficient statistical estimation. A simple method is to linearly average the parameters of the local models, which, however, tends to be degenerate or not applicable on non-convex models, or models with different parameter dimensions. One more practical strategy is to generate bootstrap samples from the local models, and then learn a joint model based on the combined bootstrap set. Unfortunately, t…
We propose a distributed bootstrap method for simultaneous inference on high-dimensional massive data that are stored and processed with many machines. The method produces an $\ell_\infty$-norm confidence region based on a communication-efficient de-biased lasso, and we propose an efficient cross-validation approach to tune the method at every iteration. We theoretically prove a lower bound on the number of communication rounds $τ_{\min}$ that warrants the statistical accuracy and efficiency. Furthermore, $τ_{\min}$ only increases logarithmically with the number of workers and the intrinsic di…
We present an efficient algorithm for simultaneously training sparse generalized linear models across many related problems, which may arise from bootstrapping, cross-validation and nonparametric permutation testing. Our approach leverages the redundancies across problems to obtain significant computational improvements relative to solving the problems sequentially by a conventional algorithm. We demonstrate our fast simultaneous training of generalized linear models (FaSTGLZ) algorithm on a number of real-world datasets, and we run otherwise computationally intensive bootstrapping and permuta…
The construction of the simultaneous confidence bands for the integrated hazard function is considered. The Nelson--Aalen estimator is used. The simultaneous confidence bands based on bootstrap methods are presented. Two methods of construction of such confidence bands are proposed. The weird bootstrap method is used for resampling. Simulations are made to compare the actual coverage probability of the bootstrap and the asymptotic simultaneous confidence bands. It is shown that the equal--tailed bootstrap confidence band has the coverage probability closest to the nominal one. We also present …
In this paper, we address the problem of conducting statistical inference in settings involving large-scale data that may be high-dimensional and contaminated by outliers. The high volume and dimensionality of the data require distributed processing and storage solutions. We propose a two-stage distributed and robust statistical inference procedures coping with high-dimensional models by promoting sparsity. In the first stage, known as model selection, relevant predictors are locally selected by applying robust Lasso estimators to the distinct subsets of data. The variable selections from each…
We propose a double bootstrap procedure for reducing coverage error in the confidence intervals of descriptive statistics for independent and identically distributed functional data. Through a series of Monte Carlo simulations, we compare the finite sample performance of single and double bootstrap procedures for estimating the distribution of descriptive statistics for independent and identically distributed functional data. At the cost of longer computational time, the double bootstrap with the same bootstrap method reduces confidence level error and provides improved coverage accuracy than …
Strict stationarity is a common assumption used in the time series literature in order to derive asymptotic distributional results for second-order statistics, like sample autocovariances and sample autocorrelations. Focusing on weak stationarity, this paper derives the asymptotic distribution of the maximum of sample autocovariances and sample autocorrelations under weak conditions by using Gaussian approximation techniques. The asymptotic theory for parameter estimation obtained by fitting a (linear) autoregressive model to a general weakly stationary time series is revisited and a Gaussian …
In the analysis of microarray data, and in some other contemporary statistical problems, it is not uncommon to apply hypothesis tests in a highly simultaneous way. The number, $ν$ say, of tests used can be much larger than the sample sizes, $n$, to which the tests are applied, yet we wish to calibrate the tests so that the overall level of the simultaneous test is accurate. Often the sampling distribution is quite different for each test, so there may not be an opportunity for combining data across samples. In this setting, how large can $ν$ be, as a function of $n$, before level accuracy beco…
Consider the multiple linear regression model $y_{i} = \boldsymbol{x}'_{i} \boldsymbolβ + ε_{i}$, where $ε_i$'s are independent and identically distributed random variables, $\mathbf{x}_i$'s are known design vectors and $\boldsymbolβ$ is the $p \times 1$ vector of parameters. An effective way of approximating the distribution of the M-estimator $\boldsymbol{\barβ}_n$, after proper centering and scaling, is the Perturbation Bootstrap Method. In this current work, second order results of this non-naive bootstrap method have been investigated. Second order correctness is important for reducing th…
This study aims to evaluate the performance of power in the likelihood ratio test for changepoint detection by bootstrap sampling, and proposes a hypothesis test based on bootstrapped confidence interval lengths. Assuming i.i.d normally distributed errors, and using the bootstrap method, the changepoint sampling distribution is estimated. Furthermore, this study describes a method to estimate a data set with no changepoint to form the null sampling distribution. With the null sampling distribution, and the distribution of the estimated changepoint, critical values and power calculations can be…
This article is concerned with proving the consistency of Efron's (1981) bootstrap for the Kaplan-Meier estimator on the whole support of a survival function. While other works address the asymptotic Gaussianity of the estimator itself without restricting time (e.g. Gill, 1983, and Ying, 1989), we enable the construction of bootstrap-based time-simultaneous confidence bands for the whole survival function. Other practical applications include bootstrap-based confidence bands for the mean residual life-time function or the Lorenz curve as well as confidence intervals for the Gini index.
This article reviews recent progress in high-dimensional bootstrap. We first review high-dimensional central limit theorems for distributions of sample mean vectors over the rectangles, bootstrap consistency results in high dimensions, and key techniques used to establish those results. We then review selected applications of high-dimensional bootstrap: construction of simultaneous confidence sets for high-dimensional vector parameters, multiple hypothesis testing via stepdown, post-selection inference, intersection bounds for partially identified parameters, and inference on best policies in …
This paper deals with the Gaussian and bootstrap approximations to the distribution of the max statistic in high dimensions. This statistic takes the form of the maximum over components of the sum of independent random vectors and its distribution plays a key role in many high-dimensional econometric problems. Using a novel iterative randomized Lindeberg method, the paper derives new bounds for the distributional approximation errors. These new bounds substantially improve upon existing ones and simultaneously allow for a larger class of bootstrap methods.
Simultaneous inference for high-dimensional non-Gaussian time series is always considered to be a challenging problem. Such tasks require not only robust estimation of the coefficients in the random process, but also deriving limiting distribution for a sum of dependent variables. In this paper, we propose a multiplier bootstrap procedure to conduct simultaneous inference for the transition coefficients in high-dimensional non-Gaussian vector autoregressive (VAR) models. This bootstrap-assisted procedure allows the dimension of the time series to grow exponentially fast in the number of observ…
In this paper we address the problem of performing statistical inference for large scale data sets i.e., Big Data. The volume and dimensionality of the data may be so high that it cannot be processed or stored in a single computing node. We propose a scalable, statistically robust and computationally efficient bootstrap method, compatible with distributed processing and storage systems. Bootstrap resamples are constructed with smaller number of distinct data points on multiple disjoint subsets of data, similarly to the bag of little bootstrap method (BLB) [1]. Then significant savings in compu…
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…
This paper considers a new bootstrap procedure to estimate the distribution of high-dimensional $\ell_p$-statistics, i.e. the $\ell_p$-norms of the sum of $n$ independent $d$-dimensional random vectors with $d \gg n$ and $p \in [1, \infty]$. We provide a non-asymptotic characterization of the sampling distribution of $\ell_p$-statistics based on Gaussian approximation and show that the bootstrap procedure is consistent in the Kolmogorov-Smirnov distance under mild conditions on the covariance structure of the data. As an application of the general theory we propose a bootstrap hypothesis test …
In this paper we propose an autoregressive wild bootstrap method to construct confidence bands around a smooth deterministic trend. The bootstrap method is easy to implement and does not require any adjustments in the presence of missing data, which makes it particularly suitable for climatological applications. We establish the asymptotic validity of the bootstrap method for both pointwise and simultaneous confidence bands under general conditions, allowing for general patterns of missing data, serial dependence and heteroskedasticity. The finite sample properties of the method are studied in…
This paper investigates the theoretical underpinnings of two fundamental statistical inference problems, the construction of confidence sets and large-scale simultaneous hypothesis testing, in the presence of heavy-tailed data. With heavy-tailed observation noise, finite sample properties of the least squares-based methods, typified by the sample mean, are suboptimal both theoretically and empirically. In this paper, we demonstrate that the adaptive Huber regression, integrated with the multiplier bootstrap procedure, provides a useful robust alternative to the method of least squares. Our the…
In this paper, we propose to construct confidence bands by bootstrapping the debiased kernel density estimator (for density estimation) and the debiased local polynomial regression estimator (for regression analysis). The idea of using a debiased estimator was recently employed by Calonico et al. (2018b) to construct a confidence interval of the density function (and regression function) at a given point by explicitly estimating stochastic variations. We extend their ideas of using the debiased estimator and further propose a bootstrap approach for constructing simultaneous confidence bands. T…
Both seasonal unit roots and periodic variation can be prevalent in seasonal data. When testing seasonal unit roots under periodic variation, the validity of the existing methods, such as the HEGY test, remains unknown. This paper analyzes the behavior of the augmented HEGY test and the unaugmented HEGY test under periodic variation. It turns out that the asymptotic null distributions of the HEGY statistics testing the single roots at $1$ or $-1$ when there is periodic variation are identical to the asymptotic null distributions when there is no periodic variation. On the other hand, the asymp…
The Bonferroni adjustment, or the union bound, is commonly used to study rate optimality properties of statistical methods in high-dimensional problems. However, in practice, the Bonferroni adjustment is overly conservative. The extreme value theory has been proven to provide more accurate multiplicity adjustments in a number of settings, but only on ad hoc basis. Recently, Gaussian approximation has been used to justify bootstrap adjustments in large scale simultaneous inference in some general settings when $n \gg (\log p)^7$, where $p$ is the multiplicity of the inference problem and $n$ is…
We characterize the statistical bootstrap for the estimation of information-theoretic quantities from data, with particular reference to its use in the study of large-scale social phenomena. Our methods allow one to preserve, approximately, the underlying axiomatic relationships of information theory---in particular, consistency under arbitrary coarse-graining---that motivate use of these quantities in the first place, while providing reliability comparable to the state of the art for Bayesian estimators. We show how information-theoretic quantities allow for rigorous empirical study of the de…
Quantifying the uncertainty in penalized regression under group sparsity is an important open question. We establish, under a high-dimensional scaling, the asymptotic validity of a modified parametric bootstrap method for the group lasso, assuming a Gaussian error model and mild conditions on the design matrix and the true coefficients. Simulation of bootstrap samples provides simultaneous inferences on large groups of coefficients. Through extensive numerical comparisons, we demonstrate that our bootstrap method performs much better than popular competitors, highlighting its practical utility…
This paper considers distributed statistical inference for general symmetric statistics %that encompasses the U-statistics and the M-estimators in the context of massive data where the data can be stored at multiple platforms in different locations. In order to facilitate effective computation and to avoid expensive communication among different platforms, we formulate distributed statistics which can be conducted over smaller data blocks. The statistical properties of the distributed statistics are investigated in terms of the mean square error of estimation and asymptotic distributions with …
This paper proposes a novel test for simultaneous jumps in a bivariate Itô semimartingale when observation times are asynchronous and irregular. Inference is built on a realized correlation coefficient for the jumps of the two processes which is estimated using bivariate power variations of Hayashi-Yoshida type without an additional synchronization step. An associated central limit theorem is shown whose asymptotic distribution is assessed using a bootstrap procedure. Simulations show that the test works remarkably well in comparison with the much simpler case of regular observations.
We propose a distributed method for simultaneous inference for datasets with sample size much larger than the number of covariates, i.e., N >> p, in the generalized linear models framework. When such datasets are too big to be analyzed entirely by a single centralized computer, or when datasets are already stored in distributed database systems, the strategy of divide-and-combine has been the method of choice for scalability. Due to partition, the sub-dataset sample sizes may be uneven and some possibly close to p, which calls for regularization techniques to improve numerical stability. Howev…
We study the residual bootstrap (RB) method in the context of high-dimensional linear regression. Specifically, we analyze the distributional approximation of linear contrasts $c^{\top} (\hatβ_ρ-β)$, where $\hatβ_ρ$ is a ridge-regression estimator. When regression coefficients are estimated via least squares, classical results show that RB consistently approximates the laws of contrasts, provided that $p\ll n$, where the design matrix is of size $n\times p$. Up to now, relatively little work has considered how additional structure in the linear model may extend the validity of RB to the settin…
A new method is proposed for the correction of confidence intervals when the original interval does not have the correct nominal coverage probabilities in the frequentist sense. The proposed method is general and does not require any distributional assumptions. It can be applied to both frequentist and Bayesian inference where interval estimates are desired. We provide theoretical results for the consistency of the proposed estimator, and give two complex examples, on confidence interval correction for composite likelihood estimators and in approximate Bayesian computation (ABC), to demonstrat…
The bootstrap provides a simple and powerful means of assessing the quality of estimators. However, in settings involving large datasets, the computation of bootstrap-based quantities can be prohibitively demanding. As an alternative, we present the Bag of Little Bootstraps (BLB), a new procedure which incorporates features of both the bootstrap and subsampling to obtain a robust, computationally efficient means of assessing estimator quality. BLB is well suited to modern parallel and distributed computing architectures and retains the generic applicability, statistical efficiency, and favorab…
This paper studies the Gaussian approximation of high-dimensional and non-degenerate U-statistics of order two under the supremum norm. We propose a two-step Gaussian approximation procedure that does not impose structural assumptions on the data distribution. Specifically, subject to mild moment conditions on the kernel, we establish the explicit rate of convergence that decays polynomially in sample size for a high-dimensional scaling limit, where the dimension can be much larger than the sample size. We also supplement a practical Gaussian wild bootstrap method to approximate the quantiles …
Accelerated life-testing (ALT) is a very useful technique for examining the reliability of highly reliable products. It allows testing the products at higher than usual stress conditions to induce failures more quickly and economically than under typical conditions. A special case of ALT are step-stress tests that allow experimenter to increase the stress levels at fixed times. This paper deals with the multiple step step-stress model under the cumulative exposure model with lognormally distributed lifetimes in the presence of Type-II and Progressive Type-II censoring. For this model, the maxi…
Over the past decades, linear mixed models have attracted considerable attention in various fields of applied statistics. They are popular whenever clustered, hierarchical or longitudinal data are investigated. Nonetheless, statistical tools for valid simultaneous inference for mixed parameters are rare. This is surprising because one often faces inferential problems beyond the pointwise examination of fixed or mixed parameters. For example, there is an interest in a comparative analysis of cluster-level parameters or subject-specific estimates in studies with repeated measurements. We discuss…
The bootstrap provides a simple and powerful means of assessing the quality of estimators. However, in settings involving large datasets---which are increasingly prevalent---the computation of bootstrap-based quantities can be prohibitively demanding computationally. While variants such as subsampling and the $m$ out of $n$ bootstrap can be used in principle to reduce the cost of bootstrap computations, we find that these methods are generally not robust to specification of hyperparameters (such as the number of subsampled data points), and they often require use of more prior information (suc…
Northwestern Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；School of Marine Science and Technology（海洋科学与技术学院）；Center for Intelligent Acoustics and Immersive Communications（智能声学与沉浸式通信中心）；China（中国）
Multilayer bootstrap network builds a gradually narrowed multilayer nonlinear network from bottom up for unsupervised nonlinear dimensionality reduction. Each layer of the network is a nonparametric density estimator. It consists of a group of k-centroids clusterings. Each clustering randomly selects data points with randomly selected features as its centroids, and learns a one-hot encoder by one-nearest-neighbor optimization. Geometrically, the nonparametric density estimator at each layer projects the input data space to a uniformly-distributed discrete feature space, where the similarity of…
NEC System Platform Research Laboratories（NEC系统平台研究所）；NEC Data Science Research Laboratories（NEC数据科学研究所）
The importance of interpretability of machine learning models has been increasing due to emerging enterprise predictive analytics, threat of data privacy, accountability of artificial intelligence in society, and so on. Piecewise linear models have been actively studied to achieve both accuracy and interpretability. They often produce competitive accuracy against state-of-the-art non-linear methods. In addition, their representations (i.e., rule-based segmentation plus sparse linear formula) are often preferred by domain experts. A disadvantage of such models, however, is high computational co…
