This paper addresses the fundamental task of estimating covariance matrix functions for high-dimensional functional data/functional time series. We consider two functional factor structures encompassing either functional factors with scalar loadings or scalar factors with functional loadings, and postulate functional sparsity on the covariance of idiosyncratic errors after taking out the common unobserved factors. To facilitate estimation, we rely on the spiked matrix model and its functional generalization, and derive some novel asymptotic identifiability results, based on which we develop DIGIT and FPOET estimators under two functional factor models, respectively. Both estimators involve performing associated eigenanalysis to estimate the covariance of common components, followed by adaptive functional thresholding applied to the residual covariance. We also develop functional information criteria for model selection with theoretical guarantees. The convergence rates of involved estimated quantities are respectively established for DIGIT and FPOET estimators. Numerical studies including extensive simulations and a real data application on functional portfolio allocation are conducted to examine the finite-sample performance of the proposed methodology.
Let $X\in \mathbb{R}^p$ and $Y\in \mathbb{R}$ be two random variables. We estimate the conditional covariance matrix $\mathrm{Cov}\left(\mathrm{E}\left[\boldsymbol{X}\vert Y\right]\right)$ applying a plug-in kernel-based algorithm to its entries. Next, we investigate the estimators rate of convergence under smoothness hypotheses on the density function of $(\boldsymbol{X},Y)$. In a high-dimensional context, we improve the consistency the whole matrix estimator by providing a decreasing structure over the $\mathrm{Cov}\left(\mathrm{E}\left[\boldsymbol{X}\vert Y\right]\right)$ entries. We illust…
Conditionally Whitened Generative Models for Probabilistic Time Series Forecasting
Graduate University of Advanced Studies & The Institute of Statistical Mathematics（高级研究大学及统计数学研究所）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；The Institute of Statistical Mathematics（统计数学研究所）
In high-dimensions, many variable selection methods, such as the lasso, are often limited by excessive variability and rank deficiency of the sample covariance matrix. Covariance sparsity is a natural phenomenon in high-dimensional applications, such as microarray analysis, image processing, etc., in which a large number of predictors are independent or weakly correlated. In this paper, we propose the covariance-thresholded lasso, a new class of regression methods that can utilize covariance sparsity to improve variable selection. We establish theoretical results, under the random design setti…
We obtain a sharp convergence rate for banded covariance matrix estimates of stationary processes. A precise order of magnitude is derived for spectral radius of sample covariance matrices. We also consider a thresholded covariance matrix estimator that can better characterize sparsity if the true covariance matrix is sparse. As our main tool, we implement Toeplitz [Math. Ann. 70 (1911) 351-376] idea and relate eigenvalues of covariance matrices to the spectral densities or Fourier transforms of the covariances. We develop a large deviation result for quadratic forms of stationary processes us…
We clarify relationships between conditional (CAR) and simultaneous (SAR) autoregressive models. We review the literature on this topic and find that it is mostly incomplete. Our main result is that a SAR model can be written as a unique CAR model, and while a CAR model can be written as a SAR model, it is not unique. In fact, we show how any multivariate Gaussian distribution on a finite set of points with a positive-definite covariance matrix can be written as either a CAR or a SAR model. We illustrate how to obtain any number of SAR covariance matrices from a single CAR covariance matrix by…
Estimation of the high-dimensional banded covariance matrix is widely used in multivariate statistical analysis. To ensure the validity of estimation, we aim to test the hypothesis that the covariance matrix is banded with a certain bandwidth under the high-dimensional framework. Though several testing methods have been proposed in the literature, the existing tests are only powerful for some alternatives with certain sparsity levels, whereas they may not be powerful for alternatives with other sparsity structures. The goal of this paper is to propose a new test for the bandedness of high-dime…
Covariance estimation for high-dimensional datasets is a fundamental problem in modern day statistics with numerous applications. In these high dimensional datasets, the number of variables p is typically larger than the sample size n. A popular way of tackling this challenge is to induce sparsity in the covariance matrix, its inverse or a relevant transformation. In particular, methods inducing sparsity in the Cholesky pa- rameter of the inverse covariance matrix can be useful as they are guaranteed to give a positive definite estimate of the covariance matrix. Also, the estimated sparsity pa…
In this paper, we propose a new test for checking the parametric form of the conditional variance based on distance covariance in nonlinear and nonparametric regression models. Inherit from the nice properties of distance covariance, our test is very easy to implement in practice and less effected by the dimensionality of covariates. The asymptotic properties of the test statistic are investigated under the null and alternative hypotheses. We show that the proposed test is consistent against any alternative and can detect local alternatives converging to the null hypothesis at the parametric r…
We offer a method to estimate a covariance matrix in the special case that \textit{both} the covariance matrix and the precision matrix are sparse --- a constraint we call double sparsity. The estimation method is maximum likelihood, subject to the double sparsity constraint. In our method, only a particular class of sparsity pattern is allowed: both the matrix and its inverse must be subordinate to the same chordal graph. Compared to a naive enforcement of double sparsity, our chordal graph approach exploits a special algebraic local inverse formula. This local inverse property makes computat…
Multivariate geostatistics is based on modelling all covariances between all possible combinations of two or more variables at any sets of locations in a continuously indexed domain. Multivariate spatial covariance models need to be built with care, since any covariance matrix that is derived from such a model must be nonnegative-definite. In this article, we develop a conditional approach for spatial-model construction whose validity conditions are easy to check. We start with bivariate spatial covariance models and go on to demonstrate the approach's connection to multivariate models defined…
Conditional Gaussian graphical models (cGGM) are a recent reparametrization of the multivariate linear regression model which explicitly exhibits $i)$ the partial covariances between the predictors and the responses, and $ii)$ the partial covariances between the responses themselves. Such models are particularly suitable for interpretability since partial covariances describe strong relationships between variables. In this framework, we propose a regularization scheme to enhance the learning strategy of the model by driving the selection of the relevant input features by prior structural infor…
In this work, we extend the sparse iterative covariance-based estimator (SPICE), by generalizing the formulation to allow for different norm constraints on the signal and noise parameters in the covariance model. For a given norm, the resulting extended SPICE method enjoys the same benefits as the regular SPICE method, including being hyper-parameter free, although the choice of norms are shown to govern the sparsity in the resulting solution. Furthermore, we show that solving the extended SPICE method is equivalent to solving a penalized regression problem, which provides an alternative inter…
This paper addresses the task of estimating a covariance matrix under a patternless sparsity assumption. In contrast to existing approaches based on thresholding or shrinkage penalties, we propose a likelihood-based method that regularizes the distance from the covariance estimate to a symmetric sparsity set. This formulation avoids unwanted shrinkage induced by more common norm penalties and enables optimization of the resulting non-convex objective by solving a sequence of smooth, unconstrained subproblems. These subproblems are generated and solved via the proximal distance version of the m…
We extend path analysis by giving sufficient conditions for computing the partial covariance of two random variables from their covariance. This is specifically done by correcting the covariance with the product of some partial variance ratios. As a result, the partial covariance retains the covariance's salient feature of factorizing over the edges in the paths between the two variables of interest.
We consider covariance estimation in the multivariate generalized Gaussian distribution (MGGD) and elliptically symmetric (ES) distribution. The maximum likelihood optimization associated with this problem is non-convex, yet it has been proved that its global solution can be often computed via simple fixed point iterations. Our first contribution is a new analysis of this likelihood based on geodesic convexity that requires weaker assumptions. Our second contribution is a generalized framework for structured covariance estimation under sparsity constraints. We show that the optimizations can b…
The present paper concerns large covariance matrix estimation via composite minimization under the assumption of low rank plus sparse structure. In this approach, the low rank plus sparse decomposition of the covariance matrix is recovered by least squares minimization under nuclear norm plus $l_1$ norm penalization. This paper proposes a new estimator of that family based on an additional least-squares re-optimization step aimed at un-shrinking the eigenvalues of the low rank component estimated at the first step. We prove that such un-shrinkage causes the final estimate to approach the targe…
The paper addresses joint sparsity selection in the regression coefficient matrix and the error precision (inverse covariance) matrix for high-dimensional multivariate regression models in the Bayesian paradigm. The selected sparsity patterns are crucial to help understand the network of relationships between the predictor and response variables, as well as the conditional relationships among the latter. While Bayesian methods have the advantage of providing natural uncertainty quantification through posterior inclusion probabilities and credible intervals, current Bayesian approaches either r…
Let $\boldsymbol{X}\in \mathbb{R}^p$ and $Y\in \mathbb{R}$. In this paper we propose an estimator of the conditional covariance matrix, $\mathrm{Cov}(\mathbb{E}[\boldsymbol{X}\vert Y])$, in an inverse regression setting. Based on the estimation of a quadratic functional, this methodology provides an efficient estimator from a semi parametric point of view. We consider a functional Taylor expansion of $\mathrm{Cov}(\mathbb{E}[\boldsymbol{X}\vert Y])$ under some mild conditions and the effect of using an estimate of the unknown joint distribution. The asymptotic properties of this estimator are …
We propose a method for estimating a covariance matrix that can be represented as a sum of a low-rank matrix and a diagonal matrix. The proposed method compresses high-dimensional data, computes the sample covariance in the compressed space, and lifts it back to the ambient space via a decompression operation. A salient feature of our approach relative to existing literature on combining sparsity and low-rank structures in covariance matrix estimation is that we do not require the low-rank component to be sparse. A principled framework for estimating the compressed dimension using Stein's Unbi…
Gaussian conditional realizations are routinely used for risk assessment and planning in a variety of Earth sciences applications. Conditional realizations can be obtained by first creating unconditional realizations that are then post-conditioned by kriging. Many efficient algorithms are available for the first step, so the bottleneck resides in the second step. Instead of doing the conditional simulations with the desired covariance (F approach) or with a tapered covariance (T approach), we propose to use the taper covariance only in the conditioning step (Half-Taper or HT approach). This en…
In multivariate time series, the estimation of the covariance matrix of the observation innovations plays an important role in forecasting as it enables the computation of the standardized forecast error vectors as well as it enables the computation of confidence bounds of the forecasts. We develop an on-line, non-iterative Bayesian algorithm for estimation and forecasting. It is empirically found that, for a range of simulated time series, the proposed covariance estimator has good performance converging to the true values of the unknown observation covariance matrix. Over a simulated time se…
We propose a method for feature selection that employs kernel-based measures of independence to find a subset of covariates that is maximally predictive of the response. Building on past work in kernel dimension reduction, we show how to perform feature selection via a constrained optimization problem involving the trace of the conditional covariance operator. We prove various consistency results for this procedure, and also demonstrate that our method compares favorably with other state-of-the-art algorithms on a variety of synthetic and real data sets.
We proposed a general Principal Orthogonal complEment Thresholding (POET) framework for large-scale covariance matrix estimation based on an approximate factor model. A set of high level sufficient conditions for the procedure to achieve optimal rates of convergence under different matrix norms were brought up to better understand how POET works. Such a framework allows us to recover the results for sub-Gaussian in a more transparent way that only depends on the concentration properties of the sample covariance matrix. As a new theoretical contribution, for the first time, such a framework all…
Recent technological advances have enabled researchers in a variety of fields to collect accurately geocoded data for several variables simultaneously. In many cases it may be most appropriate to jointly model these multivariate spatial processes without constraints on their conditional relationships. When data have been collected on a regular lattice, the multivariate conditionally autoregressive (MCAR) models are a common choice. However, inference from these MCAR models relies heavily on the pre-specified neighborhood structure and often assumes a separable covariance structure. Here, we pr…
We study the estimation of the covariance matrix $Σ$ of a $p$-dimensional normal random vector based on $n$ independent observations corrupted by additive noise. Only a general nonparametric assumption is imposed on the distribution of the noise without any sparsity constraint on its covariance matrix. In this high-dimensional semiparametric deconvolution problem, we propose spectral thresholding estimators that are adaptive to the sparsity of $Σ$. We establish an oracle inequality for these estimators under model miss-specification and derive non-asymptotic minimax convergence rates that are …
This paper introduces a new data-driven methodology for estimating sparse covariance matrices of the random coefficients in logit mixture models. Researchers typically specify covariance matrices in logit mixture models under one of two extreme assumptions: either an unrestricted full covariance matrix (allowing correlations between all random coefficients), or a restricted diagonal matrix (allowing no correlations at all). Our objective is to find optimal subsets of correlated coefficients for which we estimate covariances. We propose a new estimator, called MISC, that uses a mixed-integer op…
Introducing the CP-plot for Causal Inference with Observational Studies
Qiuzhen College, Tsinghua University（清华大学丘成桐学堂）；Yau Mathematical Sciences Center, Tsinghua University（清华大学丘成桐数学科学中心）；Department of Statistics, University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校统计学系）
Regularization has become a primary tool for developing reliable estimators of the covariance matrix in high-dimensional settings. To curb the curse of dimensionality, numerous methods assume that the population covariance (or inverse covariance) matrix is sparse, while making no particular structural assumptions on the desired pattern of sparsity. A highly-related, yet complementary, literature studies the specific setting in which the measured variables have a known ordering, in which case a banded population matrix is often assumed. While the banded approach is conceptually and computationa…
Estimating large covariance and precision matrices are fundamental in modern multivariate analysis. The problems arise from statistical analysis of large panel economics and finance data. The covariance matrix reveals marginal correlations between variables, while the precision matrix encodes conditional correlations between pairs of variables given the remaining variables. In this paper, we provide a selective review of several recent developments on estimating large covariance and precision matrices. We focus on two general approaches: rank based method and factor model based method. Theorie…
This paper presents a procedure for testing the hypothesis that the underlying distribution of the data is elliptical when using robust location and scatter estimators instead of the sample mean and covariance matrix. Under mild assumptions that include elliptical distributions without first moments, we derive the test statistic asymptotic behaviour under the null hypothesis and under special alternatives. Numerical experiments allow to compare the behaviour of the tests based on the sample mean and covariance matrix with that based on robust estimators, under various elliptical distributions …
For multivariate spatial Gaussian process (GP) models, customary specifications of cross-covariance functions do not exploit relational inter-variable graphs to ensure process-level conditional independence among the variables. This is undesirable, especially for highly multivariate settings, where popular cross-covariance functions such as the multivariate Matérn suffer from a "curse of dimensionality" as the number of parameters and floating point operations scale up in quadratic and cubic order, respectively, in the number of variables. We propose a class of multivariate "Graphical Gaussian…
The thresholding covariance estimator has nice asymptotic properties for estimating sparse large covariance matrices, but it often has negative eigenvalues when used in real data analysis. To simultaneously achieve sparsity and positive definiteness, we develop a positive definite $\ell_1$-penalized covariance estimator for estimating sparse large covariance matrices. An efficient alternating direction method is derived to solve the challenging optimization problem and its convergence properties are established. Under weak regularity conditions, non-asymptotic statistical theory is also establ…
Two algorithms are proposed to simulate space-time Gaussian random fields with a covariance function belonging to an extended Gneiting class, the definition of which depends on a completely monotone function associated with the spatial structure and a conditionally negative definite function associated with the temporal structure. In both cases, the simulated random field is constructed as a weighted sum of cosine waves, with a Gaussian spatial frequency vector and a uniform phase. The difference lies in the way to handle the temporal component. The first algorithm relies on a spectral decompo…
Covariance matrix estimation is one of the most important problems in statistics. To accommodate the complexity of modern datasets, it is desired to have estimation procedures that not only can incorporate the structural assumptions of covariance matrices, but are also robust to outliers from arbitrary sources. In this paper, we define a new concept called matrix depth and then propose a robust covariance matrix estimator by maximizing the empirical depth function. The proposed estimator is shown to achieve minimax optimal rate under Huber's $ε$-contamination model for estimating covariance/sc…
We consider testing the equality of two high-dimensional covariance matrices by carrying out a multi-level thresholding procedure, which is designed to detect sparse and faint differences between the covariances. A novel U-statistic composition is developed to establish the asymptotic distribution of the thresholding statistics in conjunction with the matrix blocking and the coupling techniques. We propose a multi-thresholding test that is shown to be powerful in detecting sparse and weak differences between two covariance matrices. The test is shown to have attractive detection boundary and t…
Selecting the optimal Markowitz porfolio depends on estimating the covariance matrix of the returns of $N$ assets from $T$ periods of historical data. Problematically, $N$ is typically of the same order as $T$, which makes the sample covariance matrix estimator perform poorly, both empirically and theoretically. While various other general purpose covariance matrix estimators have been introduced in the financial economics and statistics literature for dealing with the high dimensionality of this problem, we here propose an estimator that exploits the fact that assets are typically positively …
We consider the joint sparse estimation of regression coefficients and the covariance matrix for covariates in a high-dimensional regression model, where the predictors are both relevant to a response variable of interest and functionally related to one another via a Gaussian directed acyclic graph (DAG) model. Gaussian DAG models introduce sparsity in the Cholesky factor of the inverse covariance matrix, and the sparsity pattern in turn corresponds to specific conditional independence assumptions on the underlying predictors. A variety of methods have been developed in recent years for Bayesi…
Sparse principal component analysis (sPCA) has become one of the most widely used techniques for dimensionality reduction in high-dimensional datasets. The main challenge underlying sPCA is to estimate the first vector of loadings of the population covariance matrix, provided that only a certain number of loadings are non-zero. In this paper, we propose confidence intervals for individual loadings and for the largest eigenvalue of the population covariance matrix. Given an independent sample $X^i \in\mathbb R^p, i = 1,...,n,$ generated from an unknown distribution with an unknown covariance ma…
Gaussian graphical models are used for determining conditional relationships between variables. This is accomplished by identifying off-diagonal elements in the inverse-covariance matrix that are non-zero. When the ratio of variables (p) to observations (n) approaches one, the maximum likelihood estimator of the covariance matrix becomes unstable and requires shrinkage estimation. Whereas several classical (frequentist) methods have been introduced to address this issue, fully Bayesian methods remain relatively uncommon in practice and methodological literatures. Here we introduce a Bayesian m…
