Huber regression (HR) is a popular robust alternative to the least squares regression when the error follows a heavy-tailed distribution. We propose a new method called the enveloped Huber regression (EHR) by considering the envelope assumption that there exists some subspace of the predictors that has no association with the response, which is referred to as the immaterial part. More efficient estimation is achieved via the removal of the immaterial part. Different from the envelope least squares (ENV) model whose estimation is based on maximum normal likelihood, the estimation of the EHR model is through Generalized Method of Moments. The asymptotic normality of the EHR estimator is established, and it is shown that EHR is more efficient than HR. Moreover, EHR is more efficient than ENV when the error distribution is heavy-tailed, while maintaining a small efficiency loss when the error distribution is normal. Moreover, our theory also covers the heteroscedastic case in which the error may depend on the covariates. Extensive simulation studies confirm the messages from the asymptotic theory. EHR is further illustrated on a real dataset.
Distributed data naturally arise in scenarios involving multiple sources of observations, each stored at a different location. Directly pooling all the data together is often prohibited due to limited bandwidth and storage, or due to privacy protocols. This paper introduces a new robust distributed algorithm for fitting linear regressions when data are subject to heavy-tailed and/or asymmetric errors with finite second moments. The algorithm only communicates gradient information at each iteration and therefore is communication-efficient. Statistically, the resulting estimator achieves the cen…
We propose an algorithm, semismooth Newton coordinate descent (SNCD), for the elastic-net penalized Huber loss regression and quantile regression in high dimensional settings. Unlike existing coordinate descent type algorithms, the SNCD updates each regression coefficient and its corresponding subgradient simultaneously in each iteration. It combines the strengths of the coordinate descent and the semismooth Newton algorithm, and effectively solves the computational challenges posed by dimensionality and nonsmoothness. We establish the convergence properties of the algorithm. In addition, we p…
National Technical University of Athens（雅典国立技术大学）；Hellenic Air Force（希腊空军）；World Meteorological Organisation (WMO)（世界气象组织）；University of the West of England（西英格兰大学）
This paper studies robust regression for data on Riemannian manifolds. Geodesic regression is the generalization of linear regression to a setting with a manifold-valued dependent variable and one or more real-valued independent variables. The existing work on geodesic regression uses the sum-of-squared errors to find the solution, but as in the classical Euclidean case, the least-squares method is highly sensitive to outliers. In this paper, we use M-type estimators, including the $L_1$, Huber and Tukey biweight estimators, to perform robust geodesic regression, and describe how to calculate …
M-quantile regression is a general form of quantile-like regression which usually utilises the Huber influence function and corresponding tuning constant. Estimation requires a nuisance scale parameter to ensure the M-quantile estimates are scale invariant, with several scale estimators having previously been proposed. In this paper we assess these scale estimators and evaluate their suitability, as well as proposing a new scale estimator based on the method of moments. Further, we present two approaches for estimating data-driven tuning constant selection for M-quantile regression. The tuning…
This paper studies robust regression in the settings of Huber's $ε$-contamination models. We consider estimators that are maximizers of multivariate regression depth functions. These estimators are shown to achieve minimax rates in the settings of $ε$-contamination models for various regression problems including nonparametric regression, sparse linear regression, reduced rank regression, etc. We also discuss a general notion of depth function for linear operators that has potential applications in robust functional linear regression.
The Bayesian lasso is well-known as a Bayesian alternative for Lasso. Although the advantage of the Bayesian lasso is capable of full probabilistic uncertain quantification for parameters, the corresponding posterior distribution can be sensitive to outliers. To overcome such problem, robust Bayesian regression models have been proposed in recent years. In this paper, we consider the robust and efficient estimation for the Bayesian Huberized lasso regression in fully Bayesian perspective. A new posterior computation algorithm for the Bayesian Huberized lasso regression is proposed. The propose…
Maximum likelihood estimation in logistic regression with mixed effects is known to often result in estimates on the boundary of the parameter space. Such estimates, which include infinite values for fixed effects and singular or infinite variance components, can cause havoc to numerical estimation procedures and inference. We introduce an appropriately scaled additive penalty to the log-likelihood function, or an approximation thereof, which penalizes the fixed effects by the Jeffreys' invariant prior for the model with no random effects and the variance components by a composition of negativ…
For some special data in reality, such as the genetic data, adjacent genes may have the similar function. Thus ensuring the smoothness between adjacent genes is highly necessary. But, in this case, the standard lasso penalty just doesn't seem appropriate anymore. On the other hand, in high-dimensional statistics, some datasets are easily contaminated by outliers or contain variables with heavy-tailed distributions, which makes many conventional methods inadequate. To address both issues, in this paper, we propose an adaptive Huber regression for robust estimation and inference, in which, the f…
We mainly study the M-estimation method for the high-dimensional linear regression model, and discuss the properties of M-estimator when the penalty term is the local linear approximation. In fact, M-estimation method is a framework, which covers the methods of the least absolute deviation, the quantile regression, least squares regression and Huber regression. We show that the proposed estimator possesses the good properties by applying certain assumptions. In the part of numerical simulation, we select the appropriate algorithm to show the good robustness of this method
High-dimensional linear regression has been intensively studied in the community of statistics in the last two decades. For the convenience of theoretical analyses, classical methods usually assume independent observations and sub-Gaussian-tailed errors. However, neither of them hold in many real high-dimensional time-series data. Recently [Sun, Zhou, Fan, 2019, J. Amer. Stat. Assoc., in press] proposed Adaptive Huber Regression (AHR) to address the issue of heavy-tailed errors. They discover that the robustification parameter of the Huber loss should adapt to the sample size, the dimensionali…
Adaptive deep nonparametric regression from dependent data under covariate shift
Université Jean Monnet, ICJ UMR5208, CNRS, Ecole Centrale de Lyon, INSA Lyon, Universite Claude Bernard Lyon 1（里昂 Jean Monnet 大学，ICJ UMR5208，国家科学研究中心，里昂中央理工大学，里昂国家理工学校，里昂大学 Claude Bernard 1）
We develop uniformly valid confidence regions for regression coefficients in a high-dimensional sparse median regression model with homoscedastic errors. Our methods are based on a moment equation that is immunized against non-regular estimation of the nuisance part of the median regression function by using Neyman's orthogonalization. We establish that the resulting instrumental median regression estimator of a target regression coefficient is asymptotically normally distributed uniformly with respect to the underlying sparse model and is semi-parametrically efficient. We also generalize our …
Traditional statistical methods are faced with new challenges due to streaming data. The major challenge is the rapidly growing volume and velocity of data, which makes storing such huge datasets in memory impossible. The paper presents an online inference framework for regression parameters in high-dimensional semiparametric single-index models with unknown link functions. The proposed online procedure updates only the current data batch and summary statistics of historical data instead of re-accessing the entire raw data set. At the same time, we do not need to estimate the unknown link func…
We consider new formulations and methods for sparse quantile regression in the high-dimensional setting. Quantile regression plays an important role in many applications, including outlier-robust exploratory analysis in gene selection. In addition, the sparsity consideration in quantile regression enables the exploration of the entire conditional distribution of the response variable given the predictors and therefore yields a more comprehensive view of the important predictors. We propose a generalized OMP algorithm for variable selection, taking the misfit loss to be either the traditional q…
This paper introduces and analyzes a procedure called Testing-based forward model selection (TBFMS) in linear regression problems. This procedure inductively selects covariates that add predictive power into a working statistical model before estimating a final regression. The criterion for deciding which covariate to include next and when to stop including covariates is derived from a profile of traditional statistical hypothesis tests. This paper proves probabilistic bounds, which depend on the quality of the tests, for prediction error and the number of selected covariates. As an example, t…
We study active sampling algorithms for linear regression, which aim to query only a few entries of a target vector $b\in\mathbb R^n$ and output a near minimizer to $\min_{x\in\mathbb R^d} \|Ax-b\|$, for a design matrix $A\in\mathbb R^{n \times d}$ and loss $\|\cdot\|$. For $p$ norm regression for any $0<p<\infty$, we give an algorithm based on Lewis weight sampling outputting a $(1+ε)$-approximate solution using just $\tilde O(d/ε^2)$ queries to $b$ for $p\in(0,1)$, $\tilde{O}(d/ε)$ queries for $1<p<2$, and $\tilde{O}(d^{p/2}/ε^p)$ queries for $2<p<\infty$. For $0<p<2$, our bounds are optimal…
Big data can easily be contaminated by outliers or contain variables with heavy-tailed distributions, which makes many conventional methods inadequate. To address this challenge, we propose the adaptive Huber regression for robust estimation and inference. The key observation is that the robustification parameter should adapt to the sample size, dimension and moments for optimal tradeoff between bias and robustness. Our theoretical framework deals with heavy-tailed distributions with bounded $(1+δ)$-th moment for any $δ> 0$. We establish a sharp phase transition for robust estimation of regres…
Sparse linear regression methods generally have a free hyperparameter which controls the amount of sparsity, and is subject to a bias-variance tradeoff. This article considers the use of Aggregated hold-out to aggregate over values of this hyperparameter, in the context of linear regression with the Huber loss function. Aggregated hold-out (Agghoo) is a procedure which averages estimators selected by hold-out (cross-validation with a single split). In the theoretical part of the article, it is proved that Agghoo satisfies a non-asymptotic oracle inequality when it is applied to sparse estimato…
We consider the non-parametric regression problem under Huber's $ε$-contamination model, in which an $ε$ fraction of observations are subject to arbitrary adversarial noise. We first show that a simple local binning median step can effectively remove the adversary noise and this median estimator is minimax optimal up to absolute constants over the Hölder function class with smoothness parameters smaller than or equal to 1. Furthermore, when the underlying function has higher smoothness, we show that using local binning median as pre-preprocessing step to remove the adversarial noise, then we c…
We study Empirical Risk Minimizers (ERM) and Regularized Empirical Risk Minimizers (RERM) for regression problems with convex and $L$-Lipschitz loss functions. We consider a setting where $|\cO|$ malicious outliers contaminate the labels. In that case, under a local Bernstein condition, we show that the $L_2$-error rate is bounded by $ r_N + AL |\cO|/N$, where $N$ is the total number of observations, $r_N$ is the $L_2$-error rate in the non-contaminated setting and $A$ is a parameter coming from the local Bernstein condition. When $r_N$ is minimax-rate-optimal in a non-contaminated setting, th…
Asymmetry along with heteroscedasticity or contamination often occurs with the growth of data dimensionality. In ultra-high dimensional data analysis, such irregular settings are usually overlooked for both theoretical and computational convenience. In this paper, we establish a framework for estimation in high-dimensional regression models using Penalized Robust Approximated quadratic M-estimators (PRAM). This framework allows general settings such as random errors lack of symmetry and homogeneity, or the covariates are not sub-Gaussian. To reduce the possible bias caused by the data's irregu…
University of Southern California（南加利福尼亚大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）
We study the problem of high-dimensional linear regression in a robust model where an $ε$-fraction of the samples can be adversarially corrupted. We focus on the fundamental setting where the covariates of the uncorrupted samples are drawn from a Gaussian distribution $\mathcal{N}(0, Σ)$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$. We give nearly tight upper bounds and computational lower bounds for this problem. Specifically, our main contributions are as follows: For the case that the covariance matrix is known to be the identity, we give a sample near-optimal and computationally efficient algorithm that outputs a ca…
A new type of redescending M-estimators is constructed, based on data augmentation with an unspecified outlier model. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the convergence of the resulting estimators to the Hubertype skipped mean are derived. By introducing a temperature parameter the concept of deterministic annealing can be applied, making the estimator insensitive to the starting point of the iteration. The properties of the annealing M-estimator as a function of the temperature are explored. Finally, two applications are presented. The first one is the robust estimation of interaction ve…
Robust and semiparametric statistics are of the same historical origin and largely employ the same locally asymptotically normal framework. In our talk, we consider he following more intrinsic connections of both fields: 1) Robust influence curves for semiparametric models with infinite dimensional nuisance parameter; for example, for semiparametric regression (Cox), and mixture models (Neyman--Scott). 2) Adaptiveness in the sense of Stein's necessary condition of robust neighborhood models and estimators with respect to a finite dimensional nuisance parameter; for example, location, linear re…
High-dimensional data subject to heavy-tailed phenomena and heterogeneity are commonly encountered in various scientific fields and bring new challenges to the classical statistical methods. In this paper, we combine the asymmetric square loss and huber-type robust technique to develop the robust expectile regression for ultrahigh dimensional heavy-tailed heterogeneous data. Different from the classical huber method, we introduce two different tuning parameters on both sides to account for possibly asymmetry and allow them to diverge to reduce bias induced by the robust approximation. In the r…
Asymptotics of Non-Convex Generalized Linear Models in High-Dimensions: A proof of the replica formula
Information Learning and Physics Laboratory, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)（信息学习与物理实验室，瑞士联邦理工学院（EPFL））；Statistical Physics of Computation Laboratory, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)（计算统计物理实验室，瑞士联邦理工学院（EPFL））；Unité de Mathématiques Pures et Appliquées, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (ENS)（数学纯与应用单位，里昂高等师范学院（ENS））
Renewable Online Expectile Regression for Heterogeneous Streaming Data with Abnormal Batches
School of Economics and Management, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学经济管理学院）；MOE Key Laboratory of Complex System Analysis and Management Decision, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学复杂系统分析与管理决策教育部重点实验室）
