In this paper, we generalize the property of local asymptotic normality (LAN) to an enlarged neighborhood, under the name of rescaled local asymptotic normality (RLAN). We obtain sufficient conditions for a regular parametric model to satisfy RLAN. We show that RLAN supports the construction of a statistically efficient estimator which maximizes a cubic approximation to the log-likelihood on this enlarged neighborhood. In the context of Monte Carlo inference, we find that this maximum cubic likelihood estimator can maintain its statistical efficiency in the presence of asymptotically increasing Monte Carlo error in likelihood evaluation.
With the rapid development of data collection and aggregation technologies in many scientific disciplines, it is becoming increasingly ubiquitous to conduct large-scale or online regression to analyze real-world data and unveil real-world evidence. In such applications, it is often numerically challenging or sometimes infeasible to store the entire dataset in memory. Consequently, classical batch-based estimation methods that involve the entire dataset are less attractive or no longer applicable. Instead, recursive estimation methods such as stochastic gradient descent that process data points…
Throughout the last decade, random forests have established themselves as among the most accurate and popular supervised learning methods. While their black-box nature has made their mathematical analysis difficult, recent work has established important statistical properties like consistency and asymptotic normality by considering subsampling in lieu of bootstrapping. Though such results open the door to traditional inference procedures, all formal methods suggested thus far place severe restrictions on the testing framework and their computational overhead precludes their practical scientifi…
Maximum likelihood estimation of linear functionals in the inverse problem of deconvolution is considered. Given observations of a random sample from a distribution $P_0\equiv P_{F_0}$ indexed by a (potentially infinite-dimensional) parameter $F_0$, which is the distribution of the latent variable in a standard additive Laplace measurement error model, one wants to estimate a linear functional of $F_0$. Asymptotically efficient maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) of integral linear functionals of the mixing distribution $F_0$ in a convolution model with the Laplace kernel density is investigat…
Score matching is a popular method for estimating unnormalized statistical models. However, it has been so far limited to simple, shallow models or low-dimensional data, due to the difficulty of computing the Hessian of log-density functions. We show this difficulty can be mitigated by projecting the scores onto random vectors before comparing them. This objective, called sliced score matching, only involves Hessian-vector products, which can be easily implemented using reverse-mode automatic differentiation. Therefore, sliced score matching is amenable to more complex models and higher dimens…
The challenges posed by complex stochastic models used in computational ecology, biology and genetics have stimulated the development of approximate approaches to statistical inference. Here we focus on Synthetic Likelihood (SL), a procedure that reduces the observed and simulated data to a set of summary statistics, and quantifies the discrepancy between them through a synthetic likelihood function. SL requires little tuning, but it relies on the approximate normality of the summary statistics. We relax this assumption by proposing a novel, more flexible, density estimator: the Extended Empir…
Gaussian random fields are a powerful tool for modeling environmental processes. For high dimensional samples, classical approaches for estimating the covariance parameters require highly challenging and massive computations, such as the evaluation of the Cholesky factorization or solving linear systems. Recently, Anitescu, Chen and Stein \cite{M.Anitescu} proposed a fast and scalable algorithm which does not need such burdensome computations. The main focus of this article is to study the asymptotic behavior of the algorithm of Anitescu et al. (ACS) for regular and irregular grids in the incr…
Quantile regression is a powerful tool for learning the relationship between a response variable and a multivariate predictor while exploring heterogeneous effects. In this paper, we consider statistical inference for quantile regression with large-scale data in the "increasing dimension" regime. We provide a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of a convolution-type smoothing approach that achieves adequate approximation to computation and inference for quantile regression. This method, which we refer to as {\it{conquer}}, turns the non-differentiable quantile loss function into a twice-differ…
Human-Anchored Inference for Ranking New Models with Large Language Model Judges
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Peking University Health Science Center, Peking University（北京大学医学部，北京大学）
We investigate the asymptotic normality of the posterior distribution in the discrete setting, when model dimension increases with sample size. We consider a probability mass function $θ_0$ on $\mathbbm{N}\setminus \{0\}$ and a sequence of truncation levels $(k_n)_n$ satisfying $k_n^3\leq n\inf_{i\leq k_n}θ_0(i).$ Let $\hatθ$ denote the maximum likelihood estimate of $(θ_0(i))_{i\leq k_n}$ and let $Δ_n(θ_0)$ denote the $k_n$-dimensional vector which $i$-th coordinate is defined by \sqrt{n} (\hatθ_n(i)-θ_0(i)) for $1\leq i\leq k_n.$ We check that under mild conditions on $θ_0$ and on the sequen…
