We propose flexible Gaussian representations for conditional cumulative distribution functions and give a concave likelihood criterion for their estimation. Optimal representations satisfy the monotonicity property of conditional cumulative distribution functions, including in finite samples and under general misspecification. We use these representations to provide a unified framework for the flexible Maximum Likelihood estimation of conditional density, cumulative distribution, and quantile functions at parametric rate. Our formulation yields substantial simplifications and finite sample improvements over related methods. An empirical application to the gender wage gap in the United States illustrates our framework.
We propose a robust method for constructing conditionally valid prediction intervals based on models for conditional distributions such as quantile and distribution regression. Our approach can be applied to important prediction problems including cross-sectional prediction, k-step-ahead forecasts, synthetic controls and counterfactual prediction, and individual treatment effects prediction. Our method exploits the probability integral transform and relies on permuting estimated ranks. Unlike regression residuals, ranks are independent of the predictors, allowing us to construct conditionally …
Isotonic distributional regression (IDR) is a powerful nonparametric technique for the estimation of conditional distributions under order restrictions. In a nutshell, IDR learns conditional distributions that are calibrated, and simultaneously optimal relative to comprehensive classes of relevant loss functions, subject to isotonicity constraints in terms of a partial order on the covariate space. Nonparametric isotonic quantile regression and nonparametric isotonic binary regression emerge as special cases. For prediction, we propose an interpolation method that generalizes extant specificat…
Bootstrap inference in factor-augmented regressions with weak factors
Center for Data Science, Waseda University（早稻田大学数据科学中心）；Department of Economics and Related Studies, University of York（约克大学经济与相关研究系）；Graduate School of Economics and Management, Tohoku University（东北大学经济管理学院）
We extend the celebrated Stone's theorem to the framework of distributional regression. More precisely, we prove that weighted empirical distribution with local probability weights satisfying the conditions of Stone's theorem provide universally consistent estimates of the conditional distributions, where the error is measured by the Wasserstein distance of order p $\ge$ 1. Furthermore, for p = 1, we determine the minimax rates of convergence on specific classes of distributions. We finally provide some applications of these results, including the estimation of conditional tail expectation or …
This paper proposes a distributionally robust approach to logistic regression. We use the Wasserstein distance to construct a ball in the space of probability distributions centered at the uniform distribution on the training samples. If the radius of this ball is chosen judiciously, we can guarantee that it contains the unknown data-generating distribution with high confidence. We then formulate a distributionally robust logistic regression model that minimizes a worst-case expected logloss function, where the worst case is taken over all distributions in the Wasserstein ball. We prove that t…
The theoretical advances on the properties of scoring rules over the past decades have broadened the use of scoring rules in probabilistic forecasting. In meteorological forecasting, statistical postprocessing techniques are essential to improve the forecasts made by deterministic physical models. Numerous state-of-the-art statistical postprocessing techniques are based on distributional regression evaluated with the Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS). However, theoretical properties of such evaluation with the CRPS have solely considered the unconditional framework (i.e. without covar…
Distributional Regression U-Nets for the Postprocessing of Precipitation Ensemble Forecasts
Université de Franche Comté（弗朗什-孔泰大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement（气候与环境科学实验室）；CEA（法国原子能和替代能源委员会）；UVSQ（凡尔赛大学）；IPSL（巴黎地球物理研究所）；CNRM（法国国家气象研究中心）；Université de Toulouse（图卢兹大学）；Météo-France（法国气象局）
DeepMind；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Google Brain（谷歌大脑）
In reinforcement learning an agent interacts with the environment by taking actions and observing the next state and reward. When sampled probabilistically, these state transitions, rewards, and actions can all induce randomness in the observed long-term return. Traditionally, reinforcement learning algorithms average over this randomness to estimate the value function. In this paper, we build on recent work advocating a distributional approach to reinforcement learning in which the distribution over returns is modeled explicitly instead of only estimating the mean. That is, we examine methods…
Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) extends the value-based approach by approximating the full distribution over future returns instead of the mean only, providing a richer signal that leads to improved performances. Quantile Regression (QR) based methods like QR-DQN project arbitrary distributions into a parametric subset of staircase distributions by minimizing the 1-Wasserstein distance. However, due to biases in the gradients, the quantile regression loss is used instead for training, guaranteeing the same minimizer and enjoying unbiased gradients. Non-crossing constraints on the q…
Institute for Math and AI（数学与人工智能研究所）；Wuhan University（武汉大学）；School of Artificial Intelligence（人工智能学院）；Department of Statistics and Data Science（统计与数据科学系）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）
Construction of valid statistical inference for estimators based on data-driven selection has received a lot of attention in the recent times. Berk et al. (2013) is possibly the first work to provide valid inference for Gaussian homoscedastic linear regression with fixed covariates under arbitrary covariate/variable selection. The setting is unrealistic and is extended by Bachoc et al. (2016) by relaxing the distributional assumptions. A major drawback of the aforementioned works is that the construction of valid confidence regions is computationally intensive. In this paper, we first prove th…
University of Tennessee Knoxville（田纳西大学诺克斯维尔分校）；University of Southern California（南加州大学）
The weighted nearest neighbors (WNN) estimator has been popularly used as a flexible and easy-to-implement nonparametric tool for mean regression estimation. The bagging technique is an elegant way to form WNN estimators with weights automatically generated to the nearest neighbors; we name the resulting estimator as the distributional nearest neighbors (DNN) for easy reference. Yet, there is a lack of distributional results for such estimator, limiting its application to statistical inference. Moreover, when the mean regression function has higher-order smoothness, DNN does not achieve the op…
In this work, we build on recent advances in distributional reinforcement learning to give a generally applicable, flexible, and state-of-the-art distributional variant of DQN. We achieve this by using quantile regression to approximate the full quantile function for the state-action return distribution. By reparameterizing a distribution over the sample space, this yields an implicitly defined return distribution and gives rise to a large class of risk-sensitive policies. We demonstrate improved performance on the 57 Atari 2600 games in the ALE, and use our algorithm's implicitly defined dist…
Distribution-on-distribution regression considers the problem of formulating and estimating a regression relationship where both covariate and response are probability distributions. The optimal transport distributional regression model postulates that the conditional Fréchet mean of the response distribution is linked to the covariate distribution via an optimal transport map. We establish the minimax rate of estimation of such a regression function, by deriving a lower-bound that matches the convergence rate attained by the Fréchet least squares estimator.
Post-processing of ensemble photovoltaic power forecasts with distributional and quantile regression methods
University of Debrecen（德布勒森大学）；Marburg University（马尔堡大学）；Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies（海德堡理论研究所）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）；Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）
This paper discusses minimum distance estimation method in the linear regression model with dependent errors which are strongly mixing. The regression parameters are estimated through the minimum distance estimation method, and asymptotic distributional properties of the estimators are discussed. A simulation study compares the performance of the minimum distance estimator with other well celebrated estimator. This simulation study shows the superiority of the minimum distance estimator over another estimator. KoulMde (R package) which was used for the simulation study is available online. See…
Deep Distributional Learning with Non-crossing Quantile Network
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；ByteDance（字节跳动）；London School of Economics and Political Science（伦敦政治经济学院）
