Fitting regression models with many multivariate responses and covariates can be challenging, but such responses and covariates sometimes have tensor-variate structure. We extend the classical multivariate regression model to exploit such structure in two ways: first, we impose four types of low-rank tensor formats on the regression coefficients. Second, we model the errors using the tensor-variate normal distribution that imposes a Kronecker separable format on the covariance matrix. We obtain maximum likelihood estimators via block-relaxation algorithms and derive their computational complexity and asymptotic distributions. Our regression framework enables us to formulate tensor-variate analysis of variance (TANOVA) methodology. This methodology, when applied in a one-way TANOVA layout, enables us to identify cerebral regions significantly associated with the interaction of suicide attempters or non-attemptor ideators and positive-, negative- or death-connoting words in a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging study. Another application uses three-way TANOVA on the Labeled Faces in the Wild image dataset to distinguish facial characteristics related to ethnic origin, age group and gender.
Statistical analysis of tensor-valued data has largely used the tensor-variate normal (TVN) distribution that may be inadequate when data comes from distributions with heavier or lighter tails. We study a general family of elliptically contoured (EC) tensor-variate distributions and derive its characterizations, moments, marginal and conditional distributions, and the EC Wishart distribution. We describe procedures for maximum likelihood estimation from data that are (1) uncorrelated draws from an EC distribution, (2) from a scale mixture of the TVN distribution, and (3) from an underlying but…
We consider the problem of estimating confidence intervals for the mean of a random variable, where the goal is to produce the smallest possible interval for a given number of samples. While minimax optimal algorithms are known for this problem in the general case, improved performance is possible under additional assumptions. In particular, we design an estimation algorithm to take advantage of side information in the form of a control variate, leveraging order statistics. Under certain conditions on the quality of the control variates, we show improved asymptotic efficiency compared to exist…
This paper considers the estimation and inference of the low-rank components in high-dimensional matrix-variate factor models, where each dimension of the matrix-variates ($p \times q$) is comparable to or greater than the number of observations ($T$). We propose an estimation method called $α$-PCA that preserves the matrix structure and aggregates mean and contemporary covariance through a hyper-parameter $α$. We develop an inferential theory, establishing consistency, the rate of convergence, and the limiting distributions, under general conditions that allow for correlations across time, ro…
Matrix variate beta (MVB) distributions are used in different fields of hypothesis testing, multivariate correlation analysis, zero regression, canonical correlation analysis and etc. In this approach a unified methodology is proposed to generate matrix variate distributions by combining the kernel of MVB distributions of different types with an unknown Borel measurable function of trace operator over matrix space, called generator component. The latter component is a principal element of these newly defined generator type matrix variate distributions. The matrix variate Kummer beta distributi…
The noncentral Wishart distribution has become more mainstream in statistics as the prevalence of applications involving sample covariances with underlying multivariate Gaussian populations as dramatically increased since the advent of computers. Multiple sources in the literature deal with local approximations of the noncentral Wishart distribution with respect to its central counterpart. However, no source has yet developed explicit local approximations for the (central) Wishart distribution in terms of a normal analogue, which is important since Gaussian distributions are at the heart of th…
This work presents a new model and estimation procedure for the illness-death survival data where the hazard functions follow accelerated failure time (AFT) models. A shared frailty variate induces positive dependence among failure times of a subject for handling the unobserved dependency between the non-terminal and the terminal failure times given the observed covariates. Semi-parametric maximum likelihood estimation procedure is developed via a kernel smoothed-aided EM algorithm, and variances are estimated by weighted bootstrap. The model is presented in the context of existing frailty-bas…
We consider the related problems of estimating the $l_2$-norm and the squared $l_2$-norm in sparse linear regression with unknown variance, as well as the problem of testing the hypothesis that the regression parameter is null under sparse alternatives with $l_2$ separation. We establish the minimax optimal rates of estimation (respectively, testing) in these three problems.
HEUDIASYC - UMR CNRS 7253（法国国家科学研究中心7253联合研究单位 启发式与诊断复杂系统实验室）；Université de Technologie de Compiègne（贡比涅技术大学）
There are relatively few works dealing with conformal prediction for multi-task learning issues, and this is particularly true for multi-target regression. This paper focuses on the problem of providing valid (i.e., frequency calibrated) multi-variate predictions. To do so, we propose to use copula functions applied to deep neural networks for inductive conformal prediction. We show that the proposed method ensures efficiency and validity for multi-target regression problems on various data sets.
Modern technology often generates data with complex structures in which both response and explanatory variables are matrix-valued. Existing methods in the literature are able to tackle matrix-valued predictors but are rather limited for matrix-valued responses. In this article, we study matrix-variate regressions for such data, where the response Y on each experimental unit is a random matrix and the predictor X can be either a scalar, a vector, or a matrix, treated as non-stochastic in terms of the conditional distribution Y|X. We propose models for matrix-variate regressions and then develop…
We present a practical approach for computing the sandwich variance estimator in two-stage regression model settings. As a motivating example for two-stage regression, we consider regression calibration, a popular approach for addressing covariate measurement error. The sandwich variance approach has been rarely applied in regression calibration, despite that it requires less computation time than popular resampling approaches for variance estimation, specifically the bootstrap. This is likely due to requiring specialized statistical coding. In practice, a simple bootstrap approach with Wald c…
It's all In the (Exponential) Family: An Equivalence between Maximum Likelihood Estimation and Control Variates for Sketching Algorithms
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Bucknell University, USA（数学与统计学系，布克内尔大学，美国）；School of Data Science, University of Virginia, USA（数据科学学院，弗吉尼亚大学，美国）；Department of CSE, IIT Hyderabad, India（计算机科学与工程系，IIT海得拉巴，印度）；Department of Computer Science, Wake Forest University, USA（计算机科学系，韦克森林大学，美国）；Institute for Infocomm Research, (I 2 R), A*STAR, Singapore（信息与通信研究院（I 2 R），A*STAR，新加坡）
A new methodology is presented for the construction of control variates to reduce the variance of additive functionals of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) samplers. Our control variates are definedthrough the minimization of the asymptotic variance of the Langevin diffusion over a family of functions, which can be seen as a quadratic risk minimization procedure. The use of these control variates is theoretically justified. We show that the asymptotic variances of some well-known MCMC algorithms, including the Random Walk Metropolis and the (Metropolis) Unadjusted/Adjusted Langevin Algorithm, ar…
Monte Carlo estimation in plays a crucial role in stochastic reaction networks. However, reducing the statistical uncertainty of the corresponding estimators requires sampling a large number of trajectories. We propose control variates based on the statistical moments of the process to reduce the estimators' variances. We develop an algorithm that selects an efficient subset of infinitely many control variates. To this end, the algorithm uses resampling and a redundancy-aware greedy selection. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach in several case studies.
Zero-variance control variates (ZV-CV) are a post-processing method to reduce the variance of Monte Carlo estimators of expectations using the derivatives of the log target. Once the derivatives are available, the only additional computational effort lies in solving a linear regression problem. Significant variance reductions have been achieved with this method in low dimensional examples, but the number of covariates in the regression rapidly increases with the dimension of the target. In this paper, we present compelling empirical evidence that the use of penalized regression techniques in t…
The recent growth in multi-fidelity uncertainty quantification has given rise to a large set of variance reduction techniques that leverage information from model ensembles to provide variance reduction for estimates of the statistics of a high-fidelity model. In this paper we provide two contributions: (1) we utilize an ensemble estimator to account for uncertainties in the optimal weights of approximate control variate (ACV) approaches and derive lower bounds on the number of samples required to guarantee variance reduction; and (2) we extend an existing multi-fidelity importance sampling (M…
Logistic regression has been widely applied in the field of biomedical research for a long time. In some applications, covariates of interest have a natural structure, such as being a matrix, at the time of collection. The rows and columns of the covariate matrix then have certain physical meanings, and they must contain useful information regarding the response. If we simply stack the covariate matrix as a vector and fit the conventional logistic regression model, relevant information can be lost, and the problem of inefficiency will arise. Motivated from these reasons, we propose in this pap…
Tensor-variate Gaussian process regression for efficient emulation of complex systems: comparing regressor and covariance structures in outer product and parallel partial emulators
Classical scalar-response regression methods treat covariates as a vector and estimate a corresponding vector of regression coefficients. In medical applications, however, regressors are often in a form of multi-dimensional arrays. For example, one may be interested in using MRI imaging to identify which brain regions are associated with a health outcome. Vectorizing the two-dimensional image arrays is an unsatisfactory approach since it destroys the inherent spatial structure of the images and can be computationally challenging. We present an alternative approach - regularized matrix regressi…
We introduce a general framework that constructs estimators with reduced variance for random walk Metropolis and Metropolis-adjusted Langevin algorithms. The resulting estimators require negligible computational cost and are derived in a post-process manner utilising all proposal values of the Metropolis algorithms. Variance reduction is achieved by producing control variates through the approximate solution of the Poisson equation associated with the target density of the Markov chain. The proposed method is based on approximating the target density with a Gaussian and then utilising accurate…
Cluster-weighted models (CWMs) extend finite mixtures of regressions (FMRs) in order to allow the distribution of covariates to contribute to the clustering process. In a matrix-variate framework, the matrix-variate normal CWM has been recently introduced. However, problems may be encountered when data exhibit skewness or other deviations from normality in the responses, covariates or both. Thus, we introduce a family of 24 matrix-variate CWMs which are obtained by allowing both the responses and covariates to be modelled by using one of four existing skewed matrix-variate distributions or the…
Bayesian model comparison relies upon the model evidence, yet for many models of interest the model evidence is unavailable in closed form and must be approximated. Many of the estimators for evidence that have been proposed in the Monte Carlo literature suffer from high variability. This paper considers the reduction of variance that can be achieved by exploiting control variates in this setting. Our methodology is based on thermodynamic integration and applies whenever the gradient of both the log-likelihood and the log-prior with respect to the parameters can be efficiently evaluated. Resul…
Studies often estimate associations between an outcome and multiple variates. For example, studies of diagnostic test accuracy estimate sensitivity and specificity, and studies of predictive and prognostic factors typically estimate associations for multiple factors. Meta-analysis is a family of statistical methods for synthesizing estimates across multiple studies. Multivariate models exist that account for within-study correlations and between-study heterogeneity. The number of parameters that must be estimated in existing models is quadratic in the number of variates (e.g., risk factors). T…
We use the theory of normal variance-mean mixtures to derive a data-augmentation scheme for a class of common regularization problems. This generalizes existing theory on normal variance mixtures for priors in regression and classification. It also allows variants of the expectation-maximization algorithm to be brought to bear on a wider range of models than previously appreciated. We demonstrate the method on several examples, including sparse quantile regression and binary logistic regression. We also show that quasi-Newton acceleration can substantially improve the speed of the algorithm wi…
We perform a Bayesian analysis of the p-variate skew-t model, providing a new parameterization, a set of non-informative priors and a sampler specifically designed to explore the posterior density of the model parameters. Extensions, such as the multivariate regression model with skewed errors and the stochastic frontiers model, are easily accommodated. A novelty introduced in the paper is given by the extension of the bivariate skew-normal model given in Liseo & Parisi (2013) to a more realistic p-variate skew-t model. We also introduce the R package mvst, which allows to estimate the multiva…
The nested error regression model is a useful tool for analyzing clustered (grouped) data, and is especially used in small area estimation. The classical nested error regression model assumes normality of random effects and error terms, and homoscedastic variances. However, these assumptions are often violated in real applications and more flexible models are required. This article proposes a nested error regression model with heteroscedastic variances, where the normality for the underlying distributions is not assumed. We propose the structure of heteroscedastic variances by using some speci…
Estimation of a treatment effect by a regression discontinuity design faces a severe challenge when the running variable contains measurement errors since the errors smoothen the discontinuity on which the identification depends. The existing studies show that the variance of the measurement errors plays a vital role in both bias correction and identification under such situations. However, the methodologies to estimate the variance from data are relatively undeveloped. This paper proposes two estimators for the variance of measurement errors of running variables of sharp regression continuity…
