We show that nonparametric regression is asymptotically equivalent in Le Cam's sense with a sequence of Gaussian white noise experiments as the number of observations tends to infinity. We propose a general constructive framework based on approximation spaces, which permits to achieve asymptotic equivalence even in the cases of multivariate and random design.
This paper studies nonparametric estimation of parameters of multivariate Hawkes processes. We consider the Bayesian setting and derive posterior concentration rates. First rates are derived for L1-metrics for stochastic intensities of the Hawkes process. We then deduce rates for the L1-norm of interactions functions of the process. Our results are exemplified by using priors based on piecewise constant functions, with regular or random partitions and priors based on mixtures of Betas distributions. Numerical illustrations are then proposed with in mind applications for inferring functional co…
We consider a continuous-time stochastic volatility model. The model contains a stationary volatility process, the multivariate density of the finite dimensional distributions of which we aim to estimate. We assume that we observe the process at discrete instants in time. The sampling times will be equidistant with vanishing distance. A multivariate Fourier-type deconvolution kernel density estimator based on the logarithm of the squared processes is proposed to estimate the multivariate volatility density. An expansion of the bias and a bound on the variance are derived. Key words: stochastic…
We consider the nonparametric estimation problem of time-dependent multivariate functions observed in a presence of additive cylindrical Gaussian white noise of a small intensity. We derive minimax lower bounds for the $L^2$-risk in the proposed spatio-temporal model as the intensity goes to zero, when the underlying unknown response function is assumed to belong to a ball of appropriately constructed inhomogeneous time-dependent multivariate functions, motivated by practical applications. Furthermore, we propose both non-adaptive linear and adaptive non-linear wavelet estimators that are asym…
Hawkes (1971) introduced a powerful multivariate point process model of mutually exciting processes to explain causal structure in data. In this paper it is shown that the Granger causality structure of such processes is fully encoded in the corresponding link functions of the model. A new nonparametric estimator of the link functions based on a time-discretized version of the point process is introduced by using an infinite order autoregression. Consistency of the new estimator is derived. The estimator is applied to simulated data and to neural spike train data from the spinal dorsal horn of…
We provide a nonparametric method for the computation of instantaneous multivariate volatility for continuous semi-martingales, which is based on Fourier analysis. The co-volatility is reconstructed as a stochastic function of time by establishing a connection between the Fourier transform of the prices process and the Fourier transform of the co-volatility process. A nonparametric estimator is derived given a discrete unevenly spaced and asynchronously sampled observations of the asset price processes. The asymptotic properties of the random estimator are studied: namely, consistency in proba…
It is proved that nonparametric autoregression is asymptotically equivalent in the sense of Le Cam's deficiency distance to nonparametric regression with random design as well as with regular nonrandom design.
This paper deals with the consistency of the least squares estimator of a convex regression function when the predictor is multidimensional. We characterize and discuss the computation of such an estimator via the solution of certain quadratic and linear programs. Mild sufficient conditions for the consistency of this estimator and its subdifferentials in fixed and stochastic design regression settings are provided. We also consider a regression function which is known to be convex and componentwise nonincreasing and discuss the characterization, computation and consistency of its least square…
In this paper, we consider the nonparametric regression problem with multivariate predictors. We provide a characterization of the degrees of freedom and divergence for estimators of the unknown regression function, which are obtained as outputs of linearly constrained quadratic optimization procedures, namely, minimizers of the least squares criterion with linear constraints and/or quadratic penalties. As special cases of our results, we derive explicit expressions for the degrees of freedom in many nonparametric regression problems, e.g., bounded isotonic regression, multivariate (penalized)…
We study concentration in spectral norm of nonparametric estimates of correlation matrices. We work within the confine of a Gaussian copula model. Two nonparametric estimators of the correlation matrix, the sine transformations of the Kendall's tau and Spearman's rho correlation coefficient, are studied. Expected spectrum error bound is obtained for both the estimators. A general large deviation bound for the maximum spectral error of a collection of submatrices of a given dimension is also established. These results prove that when both the number of variables and sample size are large, the s…
Density estimation represents one of the most successful applications of Bayesian nonparametrics. In particular, Dirichlet process mixtures of normals are the gold standard for density estimation and their asymptotic properties have been studied extensively, especially in the univariate case. However a gap between practitioners and the current theoretical literature is present. So far, posterior asymptotic results in the multivariate case are available only for location mixtures of Gaussian kernels with independent prior on the common covariance matrix, while in practice as well as from a conc…
Although continuous density estimation has received abundant attention in the Bayesian nonparametrics literature, there is limited theory on multivariate mixed scale density estimation. In this note, we consider a general framework to jointly model continuous, count and categorical variables under a nonparametric prior, which is induced through rounding latent variables having an unknown density with respect to Lebesgue measure. For the proposed class of priors, we provide sufficient conditions for large support, strong consistency and rates of posterior contraction. These conditions allow one…
In this paper, a novel Bayesian nonparametric test for assessing multivariate normal models is presented. While there are extensive frequentist and graphical methods for testing multivariate normality, it is challenging to find Bayesian counterparts. The proposed approach is based on the use of the Dirichlet process and Mahalanobis distance. More precisely, the Mahalanobis distance is employed as a good technique to transform the $m$-variate problem into a univariate problem. Then the Dirichlet process is used as a prior on the distribution of the Mahalanobis distance. The concentration of the…
In this paper, we propose novel, fully Bayesian non-parametric tests for one-sample and two-sample multivariate location problems. We model the underlying distribution using a Dirichlet process prior, and develop a testing procedure based on the posterior credible region for the spatial median functional of the distribution. For the one-sample problem, we fail to reject the null hypothesis if the credible set contains the null value. For the two-sample problem, we form a credible set for the difference of the spatial medians of the two samples and we fail to reject the null hypothesis of equal…
There has been a wide interest to extend univariate and multivariate nonparametric procedures to clustered and hierarchical data. Traditionally, parametric mixed models have been used to account for the correlation structures among the dependent observational units. In this work we extend multivariate nonparametric procedures for one-sample and several samples location problems to clustered data settings. The results are given for a general score function, but with an emphasis on spatial sign and rank methods. Mixed models notation involving design matrices for fixed and random effects is used…
In this paper, a nonparametric estimator is proposed for estimating the L1-median for multivariate conditional distribution when the covariates take values in an infinite dimensional space. The multivariate case is more appropriate to predict the components of a vector of random variables simultaneously rather than predicting each of them separately. While estimating the conditional L1-median function using the well-known Nadarya-Waston estimator, we establish the strong consistency of this estimator as well as the asymptotic normality. We also present some simulations and provide how to built…
This paper introduces and studies multivariate spacings. The spacings are developed using the order statistics derived from data depth. Specifically, the spacing between two consecutive order statistics is the region which bridges the two order statistics, in the sense that the region contains all the points whose depth values fall between the depth values of the two consecutive order statistics. These multivariate spacings can be viewed as a data-driven realization of the so-called ``statistically equivalent blocks.'' These spacings assume a form of center-outward layers of ``shells'' (``ring…
In this paper, we propose a theoretical analysis of the algorithm ISDE, introduced in previous work. From a dataset, ISDE learns a density written as a product of marginal density estimators over a partition of the features. We show that under some hypotheses, the Kullback-Leibler loss between the proper density and the output of ISDE is a bias term plus the sum of two terms which goes to zero as the number of samples goes to infinity. The rate of convergence indicates that ISDE tackles the curse of dimensionality by reducing the dimension from the one of the ambient space to the one of the bi…
Asymptotic equivalence theory developed in the literature so far are only for bounded loss functions. This limits the potential applications of the theory because many commonly used loss functions in statistical inference are unbounded. In this paper we develop asymptotic equivalence results for robust nonparametric regression with unbounded loss functions. The results imply that all the Gaussian nonparametric regression procedures can be robustified in a unified way. A key step in our equivalence argument is to bin the data and then take the median of each bin. The asymptotic equivalence resu…
Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) is a powerful and versatile method to infer and quantify main and interaction effects in metric multivariate multi-factor data. It is, however, neither robust against change in units nor a meaningful tool for ordinal data. Thus, we propose a novel nonparametric MANOVA. Contrary to existing rank-based procedures we infer hypotheses formulated in terms of meaningful Mann-Whitney-type effects in lieu of distribution functions. The tests are based on a quadratic form in multivariate rank effect estimators and critical values are obtained by the bootstrap.…
In the setting of nonparametric multivariate regression with unknown error variance, we study asymptotic properties of a Bayesian method for estimating a regression function f and its mixed partial derivatives. We use a random series of tensor product of B-splines with normal basis coefficients as a prior for f, and the error variance is either estimated using the empirical Bayes approach or is endowed with a suitable prior in a hierarchical Bayes approach. We establish pointwise, L2 and supremum norm posterior contraction rates for f and its mixed partial derivatives, and show that they coinc…
We prove a global asymptotic equivalence of experiments in the sense of Le Cam's theory. The experiments are a continuously observed diffusion with nonparametric drift and its Euler scheme. We focus on diffusions with nonconstant-known diffusion coefficient. The asymptotic equivalence is proved by constructing explicit equivalence mappings based on random time changes. The equivalence of the discretized observation of the diffusion and the corresponding Euler scheme experiment is then derived. The impact of these equivalence results is that it justifies the use of the Euler scheme instead of t…
We formulate nonparametric and semiparametric hypothesis testing of multivariate stationary linear time series in a unified fashion and propose new test statistics based on estimators of the spectral density matrix. The limiting distributions of these test statistics under null hypotheses are always normal distributions, and they can be implemented easily for practical use. If null hypotheses are false, as the sample size goes to infinity, they diverge to infinity and consequently are consistent tests for any alternative. The approach can be applied to various null hypotheses such as the indep…
Asymptotic equivalence in Le Cam's sense for nonparametric regression experiments is extended to the case of non-regular error densities, which have jump discontinuities at their endpoints. We prove asymptotic equivalence of such regression models and the observation of two independent Poisson point processes which contain the target curve as the support boundary of its intensity function. The intensity of the point processes is of order of the sample size $n$ and involves the jump sizes as well as the design density. The statistical model significantly differs from regression problems with Ga…
Bayesian methods are developed for the multivariate nonparametric regression problem where the domain is taken to be a compact Riemannian manifold. In terms of the latter, the underlying geometry of the manifold induces certain symmetries on the multivariate nonparametric regression function. The Bayesian approach then allows one to incorporate hierarchical Bayesian methods directly into the spectral structure, thus providing a symmetry-adaptive multivariate Bayesian function estimator. One can also diffuse away some prior information in which the limiting case is a smoothing spline on the man…
In this paper we study multivariate ranks and quantiles, defined using the theory of optimal transport, and build on the work of Chernozhukov et al.(2017) and Hallin et al.(2021). We study the characterization, computation and properties of the multivariate rank and quantile functions and their empirical counterparts. We derive the uniform consistency of these empirical estimates to their population versions, under certain assumptions. In fact, we prove a Glivenko-Cantelli type theorem that shows the asymptotic stability of the empirical rank map in any direction. Under mild structural assumpt…
This paper is concerned with modeling the dependence structure of two (or more) time-series in the presence of a (possible multivariate) covariate which may include past values of the time series. We assume that the covariate influences only the conditional mean and the conditional variance of each of the time series but the distribution of the standardized innovations is not influenced by the covariate and is stable in time. The joint distribution of the time series is then determined by the conditional means, the conditional variances and the marginal distributions of the innovations, which …
In this work, we study a random orthogonal projection based least squares estimator for the stable solution of a multivariate nonparametric regression (MNPR) problem. More precisely, given an integer $d\geq 1$ corresponding to the dimension of the MNPR problem, a positive integer $N\geq 1$ and a real parameter $α\geq -\frac{1}{2},$ we show that a fairly large class of $d-$variate regression functions are well and stably approximated by its random projection over the orthonormal set of tensor product $d-$variate Jacobi polynomials with parameters $(α,α).$ The associated uni-variate Jacobi polyn…
In this paper, we propose a general framework for distribution-free nonparametric testing in multi-dimensions, based on a notion of multivariate ranks defined using the theory of measure transportation. Unlike other existing proposals in the literature, these multivariate ranks share a number of useful properties with the usual one-dimensional ranks; most importantly, these ranks are distribution-free. This crucial observation allows us to design nonparametric tests that are exactly distribution-free under the null hypothesis. We demonstrate the applicability of this approach by constructing e…
We consider the problem of adaptive inference on a regression function at a point under a multivariate nonparametric regression setting. The regression function belongs to a Hölder class and is assumed to be monotone with respect to some or all of the arguments. We derive the minimax rate of convergence for confidence intervals (CIs) that adapt to the underlying smoothness, and provide an adaptive inference procedure that obtains this minimax rate. The procedure differs from that of Cai and Low (2004), intended to yield shorter CIs under practically relevant specifications. The proposed method…
Although unbiasedness is a basic property of a good test, many tests on vector parameters or scalar parameters against two-sided alternatives are not finite-sample unbiased. This was already noticed by Sugiura [Ann. Inst. Statist. Math. 17 (1965) 261--263]; he found an alternative against which the Wilcoxon test is not unbiased. The problem is even more serious in multivariate models. When testing the hypothesis against an alternative which fits well with the experiment, it should be verified whether the power of the test under this alternative cannot be smaller than the significance level. Su…
For the class of Gauss-Markov processes we study the problem of asymptotic equivalence of the nonparametric regression model with errors given by the increments of the process and the continuous time model, where a whole path of a sum of a deterministic signal and the Gauss-Markov process can be observed. In particular we provide sufficient conditions such that asymptotic equivalence of the two models holds for functions from a given class, and we verify these for the special cases of Sobolev ellipsoids and Hölder classes with smoothness index $> 1/2$ under mild assumptions on the Gauss-Markov…
We propose a new method for model selection and model fitting in multivariate nonparametric regression models, in the framework of smoothing spline ANOVA. The ``COSSO'' is a method of regularization with the penalty functional being the sum of component norms, instead of the squared norm employed in the traditional smoothing spline method. The COSSO provides a unified framework for several recent proposals for model selection in linear models and smoothing spline ANOVA models. Theoretical properties, such as the existence and the rate of convergence of the COSSO estimator, are studied. In the …
In this work, we consider a multivariate regression model with one-sided errors. We assume for the regression function to lie in a general Hölder class and estimate it via a nonparametric local polynomial approach that consists of minimization of the local integral of a polynomial approximation lying above the data points. While the consideration of multivariate covariates offers an undeniable opportunity from an application-oriented standpoint, it requires a new method of proof to replace the established ones for the univariate case. The main purpose of this paper is to show the uniform consi…
We study the multivariate nonparametric change point detection problem, where the data are a sequence of independent $p$-dimensional random vectors whose distributions are piecewise-constant with Lipschitz densities changing at unknown times, called change points. We quantify the size of the distributional change at any change point with the supremum norm of the difference between the corresponding densities. We are concerned with the localization task of estimating the positions of the change points. In our analysis, we allow for the model parameters to vary with the total number of time poin…
In scientific applications, multivariate observations often come in tandem with temporal or spatial covariates, with which the underlying signals vary smoothly. The standard approaches such as principal component analysis and factor analysis neglect the smoothness of the data, while multivariate linear or nonparametric regression fail to leverage the correlation information among multivariate response variables. We propose a novel approach named nonparametric principal subspace regression to overcome these issues. By decoupling the model discrepancy, a simple and general two-step framework is …
In this work, we generalize the Cramér-von Mises statistic via projection-averaging to obtain a robust test for the multivariate two-sample problem. The proposed test is consistent against all fixed alternatives, robust to heavy-tailed data and minimax rate optimal against a certain class of alternatives. Our test statistic is completely free of tuning parameters and is computationally efficient even in high dimensions. When the dimension tends to infinity, the proposed test is shown to have comparable power to the existing high-dimensional mean tests under certain location models. As a by-pro…
In this paper, we are concerned with nonparametric estimation of the multivariate regression function in the presence of right censored data. More precisely, we propose a statistic that is shown to be asymptotically normally distributed under the additive assumption, and that could be used to test for additivity in the censored regression setting.
The removal of blur from a signal, in the presence of noise, is readily accomplished if the blur can be described in precise mathematical terms. However, there is growing interest in problems where the extent of blur is known only approximately, for example in terms of a blur function which depends on unknown parameters that must be computed from data. More challenging still is the case where no parametric assumptions are made about the blur function. There has been a limited amount of work in this setting, but it invariably relies on iterative methods, sometimes under assumptions that are mat…
Suppose that $\m{U} = (U_1, \ldots , U_d) $ has a Uniform$([0,1]^d)$ distribution, that $\m{Y} = (Y_1 , \ldots , Y_d) $ has the distribution $G$ on $\RR_+^d$, and let $\m{X} = (X_1 , \ldots , X_d) = (U_1 Y_1 , \ldots , U_d Y_d )$. The resulting class of distributions of $\m{X}$ (as $G$ varies over all distributions on $\RR_+^d$) is called the {\sl Scale Mixture of Uniforms} class of distributions, and the corresponding class of densities on $\RR_+^d$ is denoted by $\{\cal F}_{SMU}(d)$. We study maximum likelihood estimation in the family ${\cal F}_{SMU}(d)$. We prove existence of the MLE, esta…
In this paper, we develop nonparametric inference on spatial regression models as an extension of Lu and Tj\ostheim(2014), which develops nonparametric inference on density functions of stationary spatial processes under domain expanding and infill (DEI) asymptotics. In particular, we derive multivariate central limit theorems of mean and variance functions of nonparametric spatial regression models. Built upon those results, we propose a method to construct confidence bands for mean and variance functions.
A number of models for generating statistical data in various fields of insurance, including life insurance, pensions, and general insurance have been considered. It is shown that the insurance statistics data, as a rule, are truncated and censored, and often multivariate. We propose a non-parametric estimation of the distribution function for multivariate truncated-censored data in the form of a quasi-empirical distribution and a simple iterative algorithm for its construction. To check the accuracy of the proposed evaluation of the distribution function for truncated-censored data, simulatio…
Associated kernels have been introduced to improve the classical continuous kernels for smoothing any functional on several kinds of supports such as bounded continuous and discrete sets. This work deals with the effects of combined associated kernels on nonparametric multiple regression functions. Using the Nadaraya-Watson estimator with optimal bandwidth matrices selected by cross-validation procedure, different behaviours of multiple regression estimations are pointed out according the type of multivariate associated kernels with correlation or not. Through simulation studies, there are no …
In this paper we propose a nonparametric procedure for validating the assumption of stationarity in multivariate locally stationary time series models. We develop a bootstrap assisted test based on a Kolmogorov-Smirnov type statistic, which tracks the deviation of the time varying spectral density from its best stationary approximation. In contrast to all other nonparametric approaches, which have been proposed in the literature so far, the test statistic does not depend on any regularization parameters like smoothing bandwidths or a window length, which is usually required in a segmentation o…
We study estimation of multivariate densities $p$ of the form $p(x)=h(g(x))$ for $x\in \mathbb {R}^d$ and for a fixed monotone function $h$ and an unknown convex function $g$. The canonical example is $h(y)=e^{-y}$ for $y\in \mathbb {R}$; in this case, the resulting class of densities [\mathcal {P}(e^{-y})={p=\exp(-g):g is convex}] is well known as the class of log-concave densities. Other functions $h$ allow for classes of densities with heavier tails than the log-concave class. We first investigate when the maximum likelihood estimator $\hat{p}$ exists for the class $\mathcal {P}(h)$ for var…
Quality of Life (QOL) outcomes are important in the management of chronic illnesses. In studies of efficacies of treatments or intervention modalities, QOL scales multi-dimensional constructs are routinely used as primary endpoints. The standard data analysis strategy computes composite (average) overall and domain scores, and conducts a mixed-model analysis for evaluating efficacy or monitoring medical conditions as if these scores were in continuous metric scale. However, assumptions of parametric models like continuity and homoscedastivity can be violated in many cases. Furthermore, it is e…
Optimal minimization of an unknown function in a nonparametric multivariate regression model thanks to a dimension reduction approach
Andra(安德拉);Université Paris Cité and Sorbonne Université, CNRS, Laboratoire de Probabilités, Statistique et Modélisation(巴黎西岱大学与索邦大学,法国国家科学研究中心,概率统计与建模实验室)
In this paper we investigate the performance of periodogram based estimators of the spectral density matrix of possibly high-dimensional time series. We suggest and study shrinkage as a remedy against numerical instabilities due to deteriorating condition numbers of (kernel) smoothed periodogram matrices. Moreover, shrinking the empirical eigenvalues in the frequency domain towards one another also improves at the same time the Mean Squared Error (MSE) of these widely used nonparametric spectral estimators. Compared to some existing time domain approaches, restricted to i.i.d. data, in the fre…
The need to test whether two random vectors are independent has spawned a large number of competing measures of dependence. We are interested in nonparametric measures that are invariant under strictly increasing transformations, such as Kendall's tau, Hoeffding's D, and the more recently discovered Bergsma--Dassios sign covariance. Each of these measures exhibits symmetries that are not readily apparent from their definitions. Making these symmetries explicit, we define a new class of multivariate nonparametric measures of dependence that we refer to as Symmetric Rank Covariances. This new cl…
We consider an unknown response function $f$ defined on $Δ=[0,1]^d$, $1\le d\le\infty$, taken at $n$ random uniform design points and observed with Gaussian noise of known variance. Given a positive sequence $r_n\to 0$ as $n\to\infty$ and a known function $f_0 \in L_2(Δ)$, we propose, under general conditions, a unified framework for the goodness-of-fit testing problem for testing the null hypothesis $H_0: f=f_0$ against the alternative $H_1: f\in\CF, \|f-f_0\|\ge r_n$, where $\CF$ is an ellipsoid in the Hilbert space $ L_2(Δ)$ with respect to the tensor product Fourier basis and $\|\cdot\|$ i…
We propose a new multivariate dependency measure. It is obtained by considering a Gaussian kernel based distance between the copula transform of the given d-dimensional distribution and the uniform copula and then appropriately normalizing it. The resulting measure is shown to satisfy a number of desirable properties. A nonparametric estimate is proposed for this dependency measure and its properties (finite sample as well as asymptotic) are derived. Some comparative studies of the proposed dependency measure estimate with some widely used dependency measure estimates on artificial datasets ar…
Estimation of a conditional mean (linking a set of features to an outcome of interest) is a fundamental statistical task. While there is an appeal to flexible nonparametric procedures, effective estimation in many classical nonparametric function spaces (e.g., multivariate Sobolev spaces) can be prohibitively difficult -- both statistically and computationally -- especially when the number of features is large. In this paper, we present (penalized) sieve estimators for regression in nonparametric tensor product spaces: These spaces are more amenable to multivariate regression, and allow us to,…
This paper studies multivariate nonparametric change point localization and inference problems. The data consists of a multivariate time series with potentially short range dependence. The distribution of this data is assumed to be piecewise constant with densities in a Hölder class. The change points, or times at which the distribution changes, are unknown. We derive the limiting distributions of the change point estimators when the minimal jump size vanishes or remains constant, a first in the literature on change point settings. We are introducing two new features: a consistent estimator th…