In this article, we construct semiparametrically efficient estimators of linear functionals of a probability measure in the presence of side information using an easy empirical likelihood approach. We use estimated constraint functions and allow the number of constraints to grow with the sample size. Considered are three cases of information which can be characterized by infinitely many constraints: (1) the marginal distributions are known, (2) the marginals are unknown but identical, and (3) distributional symmetry. An improved spatial depth function is defined and its asymptotic properties are studied. Simulation results on efficiency gain are reported.
We propose simple formulas of confidence intervals for the Wald statistic, likelihood ratio statistic, and score statistic for a network meta-analysis. In addition, we consider resolutions for concerns that network meta-analyses with a small number of studies cannot hold a nominal confidence level. For a bias adjustment in analyses with a small number of studies, a Bartlett-type adjustment is a well-known method. Many Bartlett-type adjustment-type methods are based on maximum likelihood estimators. However, the network meta-analysis often uses the restricted maximum likelihood estimators that …
Many scientifically well-motivated statistical models in natural, engineering and environmental sciences are specified through a generative process, but in some cases it may not be possible to write down a likelihood for these models analytically. Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) methods, which allow Bayesian inference in these situations, are typically computationally intensive. Recently, computationally attractive empirical likelihood based ABC methods have been suggested in the literature. These methods heavily rely on the availability of a set of suitable analytically tractable estim…
We are living in the big data era, as current technologies and networks allow for the easy and routine collection of data sets in different disciplines. Bayesian Statistics offers a flexible modeling approach which is attractive for describing the complexity of these datasets. These models often exhibit a likelihood function which is intractable due to the large sample size, high number of parameters, or functional complexity. Approximate Bayesian Computational (ABC) methods provides likelihood-free methods for performing statistical inferences with Bayesian models defined by intractable likel…
Several strategies have been developed recently to ensure valid inference after model selection; some of these are easy to compute, while others fare better in terms of inferential power. In this paper, we consider a selective inference framework for Gaussian data. We propose a new method for inference through approximate maximum likelihood estimation. Our goal is to: (i) achieve better inferential power with the aid of randomization, (ii) bypass expensive MCMC sampling from exact conditional distributions that are hard to evaluate in closed forms. We construct approximate inference, e.g., p-v…
Empirical likelihood is a popular nonparametric statistical tool that does not require any distributional assumptions. In this paper, we explore the possibility of conducting variable selection via Bayesian empirical likelihood. We show theoretically that when the prior distribution satisfies certain mild conditions, the corresponding Bayesian empirical likelihood estimators are posteriorly consistent and variable selection consistent. As special cases, we show the prior of Bayesian empirical likelihood LASSO and SCAD satisfies such conditions and thus can identify the non-zero elements of the…
Linear mixed-effects models are widely used in analyzing clustered or repeated measures data. We propose a quasi-likelihood approach for estimation and inference of the unknown parameters in linear mixed-effects models with high-dimensional fixed effects. The proposed method is applicable to general settings where the dimension of the random effects and the cluster sizes are possibly large. Regarding the fixed effects, we provide rate optimal estimators and valid inference procedures that do not rely on the structural information of the variance components. We also study the estimation of vari…
The paper examines the Fractional Fourier Transform (FRFT) based technique as a tool for obtaining probability density function and its derivatives, and mainly for fitting stochastic model with the fundamental probabilistic relationships of infinite divisibility. The probability density functions are computed and the distributional proprieties such as leptokurtosis, peakedness, and asymmetry are reviewed for Variance-Gamma (VG) model and Compound Poisson with Normal Compounding model. The first and second derivatives of probability density function of the VG model are also computed in order to…
Inverse probability weighting (IPW) is widely used in many areas when data are subject to unrepresentativeness, missingness, or selection bias. An inevitable challenge with the use of IPW is that the IPW estimator can be remarkably unstable if some probabilities are very close to zero. To overcome this problem, at least three remedies have been developed in the literature: stabilizing, thresholding, and trimming. However the final estimators are still IPW type estimators, and inevitably inherit certain weaknesses of the naive IPW estimator: they may still be unstable or biased. We propose a bi…
Nonparametric maximum likelihood (NPML) for mixture models is a technique for estimating mixing distributions that has a long and rich history in statistics going back to the 1950s, and is closely related to empirical Bayes methods. Historically, NPML-based methods have been considered to be relatively impractical because of computational and theoretical obstacles. However, recent work focusing on approximate NPML methods suggests that these methods may have great promise for a variety of modern applications. Building on this recent work, a class of flexible, scalable, and easy to implement ap…
Current status data are commonly encountered in medical and epidemiological studies in which the failure time for study units is the outcome variable of interest. Data of this form are characterized by the fact that the failure time is not directly observed but rather is known relative to an observation time; i.e., the failure times are either left- or right-censored. Due to its structure, the analysis of such data can be challenging. To circumvent these challenges and to provide for a flexible modeling construct which can be used to analyze current status data, herein, a partially linear addi…
Data with uncertain, missing, censored, and correlated values are commonplace in many research fields including astronomy. Unfortunately, such data are often treated in an ad hoc way in the astronomical literature potentially resulting in inconsistent parameter estimates. Furthermore, in a realistic setting, the variables of interest or their errors may have non-normal distributions which complicates the modeling. I present a novel approach to compute the likelihood function for such data sets. This approach employs Gaussian copulas to decouple the correlation structure of variables and their …
Many scientifically well-motivated statistical models in natural, engineering, and environmental sciences are specified through a generative process. However, in some cases, it may not be possible to write down the likelihood for these models analytically. Approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) methods allow Bayesian inference in such situations. The procedures are nonetheless typically computationally intensive. Recently, computationally attractive empirical likelihood-based ABC methods have been suggested in the literature. All of these methods rely on the availability of several suitable an…
We consider the problem of parametric statistical inference when likelihood computations are prohibitively expensive but sampling from the model is possible. Several so-called likelihood-free methods have been developed to perform inference in the absence of a likelihood function. The popular synthetic likelihood approach infers the parameters by modelling summary statistics of the data by a Gaussian probability distribution. In another popular approach called approximate Bayesian computation, the inference is performed by identifying parameter values for which the summary statistics of the si…
Nonparametric tests for equality of multivariate distributions are frequently desired in research. It is commonly required that test-procedures based on relatively small samples of vectors accurately control the corresponding Type I Error (TIE) rates. Often, in the multivariate testing, extensions of null-distribution-free univariate methods, e.g., Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Cramer-von Mises type schemes, are not exact, since their null distributions depend on underlying data distributions. The present paper extends the density-based empirical likelihood technique in order to nonparametrically app…
New York University（纽约大学）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；University of Helsinki（赫尔辛基大学）；University of Geneva（日内瓦大学）
The fate of scientific hypotheses often relies on the ability of a computational model to explain the data, quantified in modern statistical approaches by the likelihood function. The log-likelihood is the key element for parameter estimation and model evaluation. However, the log-likelihood of complex models in fields such as computational biology and neuroscience is often intractable to compute analytically or numerically. In those cases, researchers can often only estimate the log-likelihood by comparing observed data with synthetic observations generated by model simulations. Standard tech…
The score test statistic using the observed information is easy to compute numerically. Its large sample distribution under the null hypothesis is well known and is equivalent to that of the score test based on the expected information, the likelihood-ratio test and the Wald test. However, several authors have noted that under the alternative this no longer holds and in particular the statistic can take negative values. Here we examine the score test using the observed information in the context of comparing two binomial proportions under imperfect detection, a common problem in ecology when s…
