The main object of investigation in this paper is a very general regression model in optional setting - when an observed process is an optional semimartingale depending on an unknown parameter. It is well-known that statistical data may present an information flow/filtration without usual conditions. The estimation problem is achieved by means of structural least squares (LS) estimates and their sequential versions. The main results of the paper are devoted to the strong consistency of such LS-estimates. For sequential LS-estimates the property of fixed accuracy is proved.
The paper compares the small-sample properties of two non-parametric quantile regression estimators. The first is based on constrained B-spline smoothing (COBS) and the other is based on a variation and slight extension of a running interval smoother, which apparently has not been studied via simulations. The motivation for this paper stems from the Well Elderly 2 study, a portion of which was aimed at understanding the association between the cortisol awakening response and two measures of stress. COBS indicated what appeared be an usual form of curvature. The modified running interval smooth…
Function-on-function linear regression is important for understanding the relationship between the response and the predictor that are both functions. In this article, we propose a reproducing kernel Hilbert space approach to function-on-function linear regressionvia the penalised least square, regularized by the thin-plate spline smoothness penalty. The minimax optimal convergence rate of our estimator of the coefficient function is studied. We derive the Bahadur representation, which allows us to propose statistical inference methods using bootstrap and the convergence of Banach-valued rando…
This paper presents a selective survey of recent developments in statistical inference and multiple testing for high-dimensional regression models, including linear and logistic regression. We examine the construction of confidence intervals and hypothesis tests for various low-dimensional objectives such as regression coefficients and linear and quadratic functionals. The key technique is to generate debiased and desparsified estimators for the targeted low-dimensional objectives and estimate their uncertainty. In addition to covering the motivations for and intuitions behind these statistica…
We propose statistical inferential procedures for panel data models with interactive fixed effects in a kernel ridge regression framework.Compared with traditional sieve methods, our method is automatic in the sense that it does not require the choice of basis functions and truncation parameters.Model complexity is controlled by a continuous regularization parameter which can be automatically selected by generalized cross validation. Based on empirical processes theory and functional analysis tools, we derive joint asymptotic distributions for the estimators in the heterogeneous setting. These…
The effectiveness of non-parametric, kernel-based methods for function estimation comes at the price of high computational complexity, which hinders their applicability in adaptive, model-based control. Motivated by approximation techniques based on sparse spectrum Gaussian processes, we focus on models given by regularized trigonometric linear regression. This paper provides an analysis of the performance of such an estimation set-up within the statistical learning framework. In particular, we derive a novel bound for the sample error in finite-dimensional spaces, accounting for noise with po…
It is clear that conventional statistical inference protocols need to be revised to deal correctly with the high-dimensional data that are now common. Most recent studies aimed at achieving this revision rely on powerful approximation techniques, that call for rigorous results against which they can be tested. In this context, the simplest case of high-dimensional linear regression has acquired significant new relevance and attention. In this paper we use the statistical physics perspective on inference to derive a number of new exact results for linear regression in the high-dimensional regim…
This paper studies sparse linear regression analysis with outliers in the responses. A parameter vector for modeling outliers is added to the standard linear regression model and then the sparse estimation problem for both coefficients and outliers is considered. The $\ell_{1}$ penalty is imposed for the coefficients, while various penalties including redescending type penalties are for the outliers. To solve the sparse estimation problem, we introduce an optimization algorithm. Under some conditions, we show the algorithmic and statistical convergence property for the coefficients obtained by…
Distributed statistical learning problems arise commonly when dealing with large datasets. In this setup, datasets are partitioned over machines, which compute locally, and communicate short messages. Communication is often the bottleneck. In this paper, we study one-step and iterative weighted parameter averaging in statistical linear models under data parallelism. We do linear regression on each machine, send the results to a central server, and take a weighted average of the parameters. Optionally, we iterate, sending back the weighted average and doing local ridge regressions centered at i…
The causal effect of an intervention (treatment/exposure) on an outcome can be estimated by: i) specifying knowledge about the data-generating process; ii) assessing under what assumptions a target quantity, such as for example a causal odds ratio, can be identified given the specified knowledge (and given the measured data); and then, iii) using appropriate statistical estimation techniques to estimate the desired parameter of interest. As regression is the cornerstone of statistical analysis, it seems obvious to ask: is it appropriate to use estimated regression parameters for causal effect …
Detecting when the underlying distribution changes for the observed time series is a fundamental problem arising in a broad spectrum of applications. In this paper, we study multiple change-point localization in the high-dimensional regression setting, which is particularly challenging as no direct observations of the parameter of interest is available. Specifically, we assume we observe $\{ x_t, y_t\}_{t=1}^n$ where $ \{ x_t\}_{t=1}^n $ are $p$-dimensional covariates, $\{y_t\}_{t=1}^n$ are the univariate responses satisfying $\mathbb{E}(y_t) = x_t^\top β_t^* \text{ for } 1\le t \le n $ and $\…
Ordinary least squares (OLS) linear regression is one of the most basic statistical techniques for data analysis. In the main stream literature and the statistical education, the study of linear regression is typically restricted to the case where the covariates are fixed, errors are mean zero Gaussians with variance independent of the (fixed) covariates. Even though OLS has been studied under misspecification from as early as the 1960's, the implications have not yet caught up with the main stream literature and applied sciences. The present article is an attempt at a unified viewpoint that m…
We consider a general nonparametric regression model called the compound model. It includes, as special cases, sparse additive regression and nonparametric (or linear) regression with many covariates but possibly a small number of relevant covariates. The compound model is characterized by three main parameters: the structure parameter describing the "macroscopic" form of the compound function, the "microscopic" sparsity parameter indicating the maximal number of relevant covariates in each component and the usual smoothness parameter corresponding to the complexity of the members of the compo…
Nonlinear expectation, including sublinear expectation as its special case, is a new and original framework of probability theory and has potential applications in some scientific fields, especially in finance risk measure and management. Under the nonlinear expectation framework, however, the related statistical models and statistical inferences have not yet been well established. The goal of this paper is to construct the sublinear expectation regression and investigate its statistical inference. First, a sublinear expectation linear regression is defined and its identifiability is given. Th…
University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）；University of California, San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Web 3 Foundation（Web3基金会）
We study the problem of list-decodable linear regression, where an adversary can corrupt a majority of the examples. Specifically, we are given a set $T$ of labeled examples $(x, y) \in \mathbb{R}^d \times \mathbb{R}$ and a parameter $0< α<1/2$ such that an $α$-fraction of the points in $T$ are i.i.d. samples from a linear regression model with Gaussian covariates, and the remaining $(1-α)$-fraction of the points are drawn from an arbitrary noise distribution. The goal is to output a small list of hypothesis vectors such that at least one of them is close to the target regression vector. Our m…
We propose inferential tools for functional linear quantile regression where the conditional quantile of a scalar response is assumed to be a linear functional of a functional covariate. In contrast to conventional approaches, we employ kernel convolution to smooth the original loss function. The coefficient function is estimated under a reproducing kernel Hilbert space framework. A gradient descent algorithm is designed to minimize the smoothed loss function with a roughness penalty. With the aid of the Banach fixed-point theorem, we show the existence and uniqueness of our proposed estimator…
Transfer learning, also referred as knowledge transfer, aims at reusing knowledge from a source dataset to a similar target one. While many empirical studies illustrate the benefits of transfer learning, few theoretical results are established especially for regression problems. In this paper a theoretical framework for the problem of parameter transfer for the linear model is proposed. It is shown that the quality of transfer for a new input vector $x$ depends on its representation in an eigenbasis involving the parameters of the problem. Furthermore a statistical test is constructed to predi…
In this paper we consider the linear regression model $Y =S X+\varepsilon $ with functional regressors and responses. We develop new inference tools to quantify deviations of the true slope $S$ from a hypothesized operator $S_0$ with respect to the Hilbert--Schmidt norm $\| S- S_0\|^2$, as well as the prediction error $\mathbb{E} \| S X - S_0 X \|^2$. Our analysis is applicable to functional time series and based on asymptotically pivotal statistics. This makes it particularly user friendly, because it avoids the choice of tuning parameters inherent in long-run variance estimation or bootstrap…
This paper studies the problem of statistical inference for genetic relatedness between binary traits based on individual-level genome-wide association data. Specifically, under the high-dimensional logistic regression models, we define parameters characterizing the cross-trait genetic correlation, the genetic covariance and the trait-specific genetic variance. A novel weighted debiasing method is developed for the logistic Lasso estimator and computationally efficient debiased estimators are proposed. The rates of convergence for these estimators are studied and their asymptotic normality is …
We analyze the statistical properties of nonparametric regression estimators using covariates which are not directly observable, but have be estimated from data in a preliminary step. These so-called generated covariates appear in numerous applications, including two-stage nonparametric regression, estimation of simultaneous equation models or censored regression models. Yet so far there seems to be no general theory for their impact on the final estimator's statistical properties. Our paper provides such results. We derive a stochastic expansion that characterizes the influence of the generat…
Deep learning has enjoyed tremendous success in a variety of applications but its application to quantile regressions remains scarce. A major advantage of the deep learning approach is its flexibility to model complex data in a more parsimonious way than nonparametric smoothing methods. However, while deep learning brought breakthroughs in prediction, it often lacks interpretability due to the black-box nature of multilayer structure with millions of parameters, hence it is not well suited for statistical inference. In this paper, we leverage the advantages of deep learning to apply it to quan…
Statistical Inference for Gradient Boosting Regression
School of Economics, Fudan University（复旦大学经济学院）；Department of Statistics and Data Science, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学沃顿商学院统计与数据科学系）
The increased availability of massive data sets provides a unique opportunity to discover subtle patterns in their distributions, but also imposes overwhelming computational challenges. To fully utilize the information contained in big data, we propose a two-step procedure: (i) estimate conditional quantile functions at different levels in a parallel computing environment; (ii) construct a conditional quantile regression process through projection based on these estimated quantile curves. Our general quantile regression framework covers both linear models with fixed or growing dimension and se…
Imputation is a popular technique for handling missing data. We consider a nonparametric approach to imputation using the kernel ridge regression technique and propose consistent variance estimation. The proposed variance estimator is based on a linearization approach which employs the entropy method to estimate the density ratio. The root-n consistency of the imputation estimator is established when a Sobolev space is utilized in the kernel ridge regression imputation, which enables us to develop the proposed variance estimator. Synthetic data experiments are presented to confirm our theory.
Logistic regression remains one of the most widely used tools in applied statistics, machine learning and data science. However, in moderately high-dimensional problems, where the number of features $d$ is a non-negligible fraction of the sample size $n$, the logistic regression maximum likelihood estimator (MLE), and statistical procedures based the large-sample approximation of its distribution, behave poorly. Recently, Sur and Candès (2019) showed that these issues can be corrected by applying a new approximation of the MLE's sampling distribution in this high-dimensional regime. Unfortunat…
We propose an optimum mechanism for providing monetary incentives to the data sources of a statistical estimator such as linear regression, so that high quality data is provided at low cost, in the sense that the sum of payments and estimation error is minimized. The mechanism applies to a broad range of estimators, including linear and polynomial regression, kernel regression, and, under some additional assumptions, ridge regression. It also generalizes to several objectives, including minimizing estimation error subject to budget constraints. Besides our concrete results for regression probl…
In this paper, we consider a statistical problem of learning a linear model from noisy samples. Existing work has focused on approximating the least squares solution by using leverage-based scores as an importance sampling distribution. However, no finite sample statistical guarantees and no computationally efficient optimal sampling strategies have been proposed. To evaluate the statistical properties of different sampling strategies, we propose a simple yet effective estimator, which is easy for theoretical analysis and is useful in multitask linear regression. We derive the exact mean squar…
Consider a noisy linear observation model with an unknown permutation, based on observing $y = Π^* A x^* + w$, where $x^* \in \mathbb{R}^d$ is an unknown vector, $Π^*$ is an unknown $n \times n$ permutation matrix, and $w \in \mathbb{R}^n$ is additive Gaussian noise. We analyze the problem of permutation recovery in a random design setting in which the entries of the matrix $A$ are drawn i.i.d. from a standard Gaussian distribution, and establish sharp conditions on the SNR, sample size $n$, and dimension $d$ under which $Π^*$ is exactly and approximately recoverable. On the computational fron…
We establish optimal convergence rates for a decomposition-based scalable approach to kernel ridge regression. The method is simple to describe: it randomly partitions a dataset of size N into m subsets of equal size, computes an independent kernel ridge regression estimator for each subset, then averages the local solutions into a global predictor. This partitioning leads to a substantial reduction in computation time versus the standard approach of performing kernel ridge regression on all N samples. Our two main theorems establish that despite the computational speed-up, statistical optimal…
This paper derives a new family of estimators, namely the minimum density power divergence estimators, as a robust generalization of the maximum likelihood estimator for the polytomous logistic regression model. Based on these estimators, a family of Wald-type test statistics for linear hypotheses is introduced. Robustness properties of both the proposed estimators and the test statistics are theoretically studied through the classical influence function analysis. Appropriate real life examples are presented to justify the requirement of suitable robust statistical procedures in place of the l…
University of Macau（澳门大学）；Zhuhai UM Science & Technology Research Institute（珠海澳大科技研究院）；Peking University（北京大学）
There has been a surge of interest in developing robust estimators for models with heavy-tailed and bounded variance data in statistics and machine learning, while few works impose unbounded variance. This paper proposes two type of robust estimators, the ridge log-truncated M-estimator and the elastic net log-truncated M-estimator. The first estimator is applied to convex regressions such as quantile regression and generalized linear models, while the other one is applied to high dimensional non-convex learning problems such as regressions via deep neural networks. Simulations and real data a…
How Fast Do Signatures Learn? Statistical Theory and Applications for Path Regression
Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford（牛津大学数学研究所）；Center for Data Science, Peking University（北京大学数据科学中心）；School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University（北京大学数学科学学院）；Oxford Man Institute, University of Oxford（牛津大学牛津人学研究所）；Center for Statistical Science, Peking University（北京大学统计科学中心）
We develop adaptive estimation and inference methods for high-dimensional Gaussian copula regression that achieve the same performance without the knowledge of the marginal transformations as that for high-dimensional linear regression. Using a Kendall's tau based covariance matrix estimator, an $\ell_1$ regularized estimator is proposed and a corresponding de-biased estimator is developed for the construction of the confidence intervals and hypothesis tests. Theoretical properties of the procedures are studied and the proposed estimation and inference methods are shown to be adaptive to the u…
These notes review six lectures given by Prof. Andrea Montanari on the topic of statistical estimation for linear models. The first two lectures cover the principles of signal recovery from linear measurements in terms of minimax risk. Subsequent lectures demonstrate the application of these principles to several practical problems in science and engineering. Specifically, these topics include denoising of error-laden signals, recovery of compressively sensed signals, reconstruction of low-rank matrices, and also the discovery of hidden cliques within large networks.
Max-affine regression refers to a model where the unknown regression function is modeled as a maximum of $k$ unknown affine functions for a fixed $k \geq 1$. This generalizes linear regression and (real) phase retrieval, and is closely related to convex regression. Working within a non-asymptotic framework, we study this problem in the high-dimensional setting assuming that $k$ is a fixed constant, and focus on estimation of the unknown coefficients of the affine functions underlying the model. We analyze a natural alternating minimization (AM) algorithm for the non-convex least squares object…
In this paper, we propose a new method for estimation and constructing confidence intervals for low-dimensional components in a high-dimensional model. The proposed estimator, called Constrained Lasso (CLasso) estimator, is obtained by simultaneously solving two estimating equations---one imposing a zero-bias constraint for the low-dimensional parameter and the other forming an $\ell_1$-penalized procedure for the high-dimensional nuisance parameter. By carefully choosing the zero-bias constraint, the resulting estimator of the low dimensional parameter is shown to admit an asymptotically norm…
When linear regression generates a relationship between a (dependent) scalar response and one or multiple independent variables, various datasets providing distinct graphical trends can develop resembling relationships based on the same statistical properties. Advanced statistical approaches, such as neural networks and machine learning methods, are of great necessity to process, characterize, and analyze these degenerate datasets. On the other hand, the accurate creation of purposedly degenerate datasets is essential to test new models in the research and education of applied statistics. In t…
We address the problem of how to achieve optimal inference in distributed quantile regression without stringent scaling conditions. This is challenging due to the non-smooth nature of the quantile regression (QR) loss function, which invalidates the use of existing methodology. The difficulties are resolved through a double-smoothing approach that is applied to the local (at each data source) and global objective functions. Despite the reliance on a delicate combination of local and global smoothing parameters, the quantile regression model is fully parametric, thereby facilitating interpretat…
Recently the shape-restricted inference has gained popularity in statistical and econometric literature in order to relax the linear or quadratic covariate effect in regression analyses. The typical shape-restricted covariate effect includes monotonic increasing, decreasing, convexity or concavity. In this paper, we introduce the shape-restricted inference to the celebrated Cox regression model (SR-Cox), in which the covariate response is modeled as shape-restricted additive functions. The SR-Cox regression approximates the shape-restricted functions using a spline basis expansion with data dr…
