Independent component analysis (ICA) is linked up with the problem of estimating a non linear functional of a density, for which optimal estimators are well known. The precision of ICA is analyzed from the viewpoint of functional spaces in the wavelet framework. In particular, it is shown that, under Besov smoothness conditions, parametric rate of convergence is achieved by a U-statistic estimator of the wavelet ICA contrast, while the previously introduced plug-in estimator $\hat C^2\_j$, with moderate computational cost, has a rate in $n^{-4s\over 4s+d}$.
In a circular convolution model, we aim to infer on the density of a circular random variable using observations contaminated by an additive measurement error. We highlight the interplay of the two problems: optimal testing and quadratic functional estimation. Under general regularity assumptions, we determine an upper bound for the minimax risk of estimation for the quadratic functional. The upper bound consists of two terms, one that mimics a classical bias-variance trade-off and a second that causes the typical elbow effect in quadratic functional estimation. Using a minimax optimal estimat…
We investigate estimation of a normal mean matrix under the matrix quadratic loss. Improved estimation under the matrix quadratic loss implies improved estimation of any linear combination of the columns. First, an unbiased estimate of risk is derived and the Efron--Morris estimator is shown to be minimax. Next, a notion of \textit{matrix superharmonicity} for matrix-variate functions is introduced and shown to have analogous properties with usual superharmonic functions, which may be of independent interest. Then, we show that the generalized Bayes estimator with respect to a matrix superharm…
We study distributional properties of a quadratic form of a stationary functional time series under mild moment conditions. As an important application, we obtain consistency rates of estimators of spectral density operators and prove joint weak convergence to a vector of complex Gaussian random operators. Weak convergence is established based on an approximation of the form via transforms of Hilbert-valued martingale difference sequences. As a side-result, the distributional properties of the long-run covariance operator are established.
We consider the estimation of quadratic functionals in a Gaussian sequence model where the eigenvalues are supposed to be unknown and accessible through noisy observations only. Imposing smoothness assumptions both on the signal and the sequence of eigenvalues, we develop a minimax theory for this problem. We propose a truncated series estimator and show that it attains the optimal rate of convergence if the truncation parameter is chosen appropriately. Consequences for testing problems in inverse problems are equally discussed: in particular, the minimax rates of testing for signal detection …
We derive convenient uniform concentration bounds and finite sample multivariate normal approximation results for quadratic forms, then describe some applications involving variance components estimation in linear random-effects models. Random-effects models and variance components estimation are classical topics in statistics, with a corresponding well-established asymptotic theory. However, our finite sample results for quadratic forms provide additional flexibility for easily analyzing random-effects models in non-standard settings, which are becoming more important in modern applications (…
Motivated by applications in genomics, this paper studies the problem of optimal estimation of a quadratic functional of two normal mean vectors, $Q(μ, θ) = \frac{1}{n}\sum_{i=1}^nμ_i^2θ_i^2$, with a particular focus on the case where both mean vectors are sparse. We propose optimal estimators of $Q(μ, θ)$ for different regimes and establish the minimax rates of convergence over a family of parameter spaces. The optimal rates exhibit interesting phase transitions in this family. The simultaneous signal detection problem is also considered under the minimax framework. It is shown that the propo…
We propose a new estimator, the quadratic form estimator, of the Kronecker product model for covariance matrices. We show that this estimator has good properties in the large dimensional case (i.e., the cross-sectional dimension $n$ is large relative to the sample size $T$). In particular, the quadratic form estimator is consistent in a relative Frobenius norm sense provided $\log^3n/T\to 0$. We obtain the limiting distributions of Lagrange multiplier (LM) and Wald tests under both the null and local alternatives concerning the mean vector $μ$. Testing linear restrictions of $μ$ is also invest…
This paper discusses the simultaneous inference of mean parameters in a family of distributions with quadratic variance function. We first introduce a class of semiparametric/parametric shrinkage estimators and establish their asymptotic optimality properties. Two specific cases, the location-scale family and the natural exponential family with quadratic variance function, are then studied in detail. We conduct a comprehensive simulation study to compare the performance of the proposed methods with existing shrinkage estimators. We also apply the method to real data and obtain encouraging resu…
For the Gaussian sequence model, we obtain non-asymptotic minimax rates of estimation of the linear, quadratic and the L2-norm functionals on classes of sparse vectors and construct optimal estimators that attain these rates. The main object of interest is the class s-sparse vectors for which we also provide completely adaptive estimators (independent of s and of the noise variance) having only logarithmically slower rates than the minimax ones. Furthermore, we obtain the minimax rates on the Lq-balls where 0 < q < 2. This analysis shows that there are, in general, three zones in the rates of …
The problem of integrated volatility estimation for the solution X of a stochastic differential equation with L{é}vy-type jumps is considered under discrete high-frequency observations in both short and long time horizon. We provide an asymptotic expansion for the integrated volatility that gives us, in detail, the contribution deriving from the jump part. The knowledge of such a contribution allows us to build an unbiased version of the truncated quadratic variation, in which the bias is visibly reduced. In earlier results the condition $β$ > 1 2(2--$α$) on $β$ (that is such that (1/n) $β$ is…
Statistical inferences for quadratic functionals of linear regression parameter have found wide applications including signal detection, global testing, inferences of error variance and fraction of variance explained. Classical theory based on ordinary least squares estimator works perfectly in the low-dimensional regime, but fails when the parameter dimension $p_n$ grows proportionally to the sample size $n$. In some cases, its performance is not satisfactory even when $n\ge 5p_n$. The main contribution of this paper is to develop {\em dimension-adaptive} inferences for quadratic functionals …
This paper presents a central limit theorem for a pre-averaged version of the realized covariance estimator for the quadratic covariation of a discretely observed semimartingale with noise. The semimartingale possibly has jumps, while the observation times show irregularity, non-synchronicity, and some dependence on the observed process. It is shown that the observation times' effect on the asymptotic distribution of the estimator is only through two characteristics: the observation frequency and the covariance structure of the noise. This is completely different from the case of the realized …
We provide a general theoretical framework to derive Bernstein-von Mises theorems for matrix functionals. The conditions on functionals and priors are explicit and easy to check. Results are obtained for various functionals including entries of covariance matrix, entries of precision matrix, quadratic forms, log-determinant, eigenvalues in the Bayesian Gaussian covariance/precision matrix estimation setting, as well as for Bayesian linear and quadratic discriminant analysis.
We derive an asymptotic expansion for the quadratic variation of a stochastic process satisfying a stochastic differential equation driven by a fractional Brownian motion, based on the theory of asymptotic expansion of Skorohod integrals converging to a mixed normal limit. In order to apply the general theory, it is necessary to estimate functionals that are a randomly weighted sum of products of multiple integrals of the fractional Brownian motion, in expanding the quadratic variation and identifying the limit random symbols. To overcome the difficulty, we introduce two types of exponents by …
In this paper we present the asymptotic analysis of the realised quadratic variation for multivariate symmetric $β$-stable Lévy processes, $β\in (0,2)$, and certain pure jump semimartingales. The main focus is on derivation of functional limit theorems for the realised quadratic variation and its spectrum. We will show that the limiting process is a matrix-valued $β$-stable Lévy process when the original process is symmetric $β$-stable, while the limit is conditionally $β$-stable in case of integrals with respect to symmetric $β$-stable motions. These asymptotic results are mostly related to t…
Partial coherence is an important quantity derived from spectral or precision matrices and is used in seismology, meteorology, oceanography, neuroscience and elsewhere. If the number of complex degrees of freedom only slightly exceeds the dimension of the multivariate stationary time series, spectral matrices are poorly conditioned and shrinkage techniques suggest themselves. When true partial coherencies are quite large then for shrinkage estimators of the diagonal weighting kind it is shown empirically that the minimization of risk using quadratic loss (QL) leads to oracle partial coherence …
We propose an estimation method that we call functional average variance estimation (FAVE), for estimating the EDR space in functional semiparametric regression model, based on kernel estimates of density and regression. Consistency results are then established for the estimator of the interest operator, and for the directions of EDR space. A simulation study that shows that the proposed approach performs as well as traditional ones is presented.
This paper considers adaptive, minimax estimation of a quadratic functional in a nonparametric instrumental variables (NPIV) model, which is an important problem in optimal estimation of a nonlinear functional of an ill-posed inverse regression with an unknown operator. We first show that a leave-one-out, sieve NPIV estimator of the quadratic functional can attain a convergence rate that coincides with the lower bound previously derived in Chen and Christensen [2018]. The minimax rate is achieved by the optimal choice of the sieve dimension (a key tuning parameter) that depends on the smoothne…
The nonlinear effects of environmental variability on species abundance plays an important role in the maintenance of ecological diversity. Nonetheless, many common models use parametric nonlinear terms pre-determining ecological conclusions. Motivated by this concern, we study the estimate of the second derivative (curvature) of the link function g in a functional single index model. Since the coefficient function and the link function are both unknown, the estimate is expressed as a nested optimization. For a fixed and unknown coefficient function, the link function and its second derivative…
We study estimation of (semi-)inner products between two nonparametric probability distributions, given IID samples from each distribution. These products include relatively well-studied classical $\mathcal{L}^2$ and Sobolev inner products, as well as those induced by translation-invariant reproducing kernels, for which we believe our results are the first. We first propose estimators for these quantities, and the induced (semi)norms and (pseudo)metrics. We then prove non-asymptotic upper bounds on their mean squared error, in terms of weights both of the inner product and of the two distribut…
