High-dimensional data can often display heterogeneity due to heteroscedastic variance or inhomogeneous covariate effects. Penalized quantile and expectile regression methods offer useful tools to detect heteroscedasticity in high-dimensional data. The former is computationally challenging due to the non-smooth nature of the check loss, and the latter is sensitive to heavy-tailed error distributions. In this paper, we propose and study (penalized) robust expectile regression (retire), with a focus on iteratively reweighted $\ell_1$-penalization which reduces the estimation bias from $\ell_1$-penalization and leads to oracle properties. Theoretically, we establish the statistical properties of the retire estimator under two regimes: (i) low-dimensional regime in which $d \ll n$; (ii) high-dimensional regime in which $s\ll n\ll d$ with $s$ denoting the number of significant predictors. In the high-dimensional setting, we carefully characterize the solution path of the iteratively reweighted $\ell_1$-penalized retire estimation, adapted from the local linear approximation algorithm for folded-concave regularization. Under a mild minimum signal strength condition, we show that after as many as $\log(\log d)$ iterations the final iterate enjoys the oracle convergence rate. At each iteration, the weighted $\ell_1$-penalized convex program can be efficiently solved by a semismooth Newton coordinate descent algorithm. Numerical studies demonstrate the competitive performance of the proposed procedure compared with either non-robust or quantile regression based alternatives.
Modern time series analysis requires the ability to handle datasets that are inherently high-dimensional; examples include applications in climatology, where measurements from numerous sensors must be taken into account, or inventory tracking of large shops, where the dimension is defined by the number of tracked items. The standard way to mitigate computational issues arising from the high dimensionality of the data is by applying some dimension reduction technique that preserves the structural properties of the ambient space. The dissimilarity between two time series is often measured by ``discrete'' notions of distance, e.g. the dynamic time warping or the discrete Fr\'echet distance. Since all these distance functions are computed directly on the points of a time series, they are sensitive to different sampling rates or gaps. The continuous Fr\'echet distance offers a popular alternative which aims to alleviate this by taking into account all points on the polygonal curve obtained by linearly interpolating between any two consecutive points in a sequence. We study the ability of random projections \`a la Johnson and Lindenstrauss to preserve the continuous Fr\'echet distance of polygonal curves by effectively reducing the dimension. In particular, we show that one can reduce the dimension to $O(\epsilon^{-2} \log N)$, where $N$ is the total number of input points while preserving the continuous Fr\'echet distance between any two determined polygonal curves within a factor of $1\pm \epsilon$. We conclude with applications on clustering.
Incomplete covariate vectors are known to be problematic for estimation and inferences on model parameters, but their impact on prediction performance is less understood. We develop an imputation-free method that builds on a random partition model admitting variable-dimension covariates. Cluster-specific response models further incorporate covariates via linear predictors, facilitating estimation of smooth prediction surfaces with relatively few clusters. We exploit marginalization techniques of Gaussian kernels to analytically project response distributions according to any pattern of missing covariates, yielding a local regression with internally consistent uncertainty propagation that utilizes only one set of coefficients per cluster. Aggressive shrinkage of these coefficients regulates uncertainty due to missing covariates. The method allows in- and out-of-sample prediction for any missingness pattern, even if the pattern in a new subject's incomplete covariate vector was not seen in the training data. We develop an MCMC algorithm for posterior sampling that improves a computationally expensive update for latent cluster allocation. Finally, we demonstrate the model's effectiveness for nonlinear point and density prediction under various circumstances by comparing with other recent methods for regression of variable dimensions on synthetic and real data.
Deep neural networks have achieved tremendous success due to their representation power and adaptation to low-dimensional structures. Their potential for estimating structured regression functions has been recently established in the literature. However, most of the studies require the input dimension to be fixed and consequently ignore the effect of dimension on the rate of convergence and hamper their applications to modern big data with high dimensionality. In this paper, we bridge this gap by analyzing a $k^{th}$ order nonparametric interaction model in both growing dimension scenarios ($d$ grows with $n$ but at a slower rate) and in high dimension ($d \gtrsim n$). In the latter case, sparsity assumptions and associated regularization are required in order to obtain optimal rates of convergence. A new challenge in diverging dimension setting is in calculation mean-square error, the covariance terms among estimated additive components are an order of magnitude larger than those of the variances and they can deteriorate statistical properties without proper care. We introduce a critical debiasing technique to amend the problem. We show that under certain standard assumptions, debiased deep neural networks achieve a minimax optimal rate both in terms of $(n, d)$. Our proof techniques rely crucially on a novel debiasing technique that makes the covariances of additive components negligible in the mean-square error calculation. In addition, we establish the matching lower bounds.
The multivariate adaptive regression spline (MARS) is one of the popular estimation methods for nonparametric multivariate regressions. However, as MARS is based on marginal splines, to incorporate interactions of covariates, products of the marginal splines must be used, which leads to an unmanageable number of basis functions when the order of interaction is high and results in low estimation efficiency. In this paper, we improve the performance of MARS by using linear combinations of the covariates which achieve sufficient dimension reduction. The special basis functions of MARS facilitate calculation of gradients of the regression function, and estimation of the linear combinations is obtained via eigen-analysis of the outer-product of the gradients. Under some technical conditions, the asymptotic theory is established for the proposed estimation method. Numerical studies including both simulation and empirical applications show its effectiveness in dimension reduction and improvement over MARS and other commonly-used nonparametric methods in regression estimation and prediction.
We prove a convergence theorem for U-statistics of degree two, where the data dimension $d$ is allowed to scale with sample size $n$. We find that the limiting distribution of a U-statistic undergoes a phase transition from the non-degenerate Gaussian limit to the degenerate limit, regardless of its degeneracy and depending only on a moment ratio. A surprising consequence is that a non-degenerate U-statistic in high dimensions can have a non-Gaussian limit with a larger variance and asymmetric distribution. Our bounds are valid for any finite $n$ and $d$, independent of individual eigenvalues of the underlying function, and dimension-independent under a mild assumption. As an application, we apply our theory to two popular kernel-based distribution tests, MMD and KSD, whose high-dimensional performance has been challenging to study. In a simple empirical setting, our results correctly predict how the test power at a fixed threshold scales with $d$ and the bandwidth.
This paper characterizes the impact of covariate serial dependence on the non-asymptotic estimation error bound of penalized regressions (PRs). Focusing on the direct relationship between the degree of cross-correlation between covariates and the estimation error bound of PRs, we show that orthogonal or weakly cross-correlated stationary AR processes can exhibit high spurious correlations caused by serial dependence. We provide analytical results on the distribution of the sample cross-correlation in the case of two orthogonal Gaussian AR(1) processes, and extend and validate them through an extensive simulation study. Furthermore, we introduce a new procedure to mitigate spurious correlations in a time series setting, applying PRs to pre-whitened (ARMA filtered) time series. We show that under mild assumptions our procedure allows both to reduce the estimation error and to develop an effective forecasting strategy. The estimation accuracy of our proposal is validated through additional simulations, as well as an empirical application to a large set of monthly macroeconomic time series relative to the Euro Area.
Explainable machine learning provides tools to better understand predictive models and their decisions, but many such methods are limited to producing insights with respect to a single class. When generating explanations for several classes, reasoning over them to obtain a complete view may be difficult since they can present competing or contradictory evidence. To address this issue we introduce a novel paradigm of multi-class explanations. We outline the theory behind such techniques and propose a local surrogate model based on multi-output regression trees -- called LIMEtree -- which offers faithful and consistent explanations of multiple classes for individual predictions while being post-hoc, model-agnostic and data-universal. In addition to strong fidelity guarantees, our implementation supports (interactive) customisation of the explanatory insights and delivers a range of diverse explanation types, including counterfactual statements favoured in the literature. We evaluate our algorithm with a collection of quantitative experiments, a qualitative analysis based on explainability desiderata and a preliminary user study on an image classification task, comparing it to LIME. Our contributions demonstrate the benefits of multi-class explanations and wide-ranging advantages of our method across a diverse set scenarios.
When estimating a Global Average Treatment Effect (GATE) under network interference, units can have widely different relationships to the treatment depending on a combination of the structure of their network neighborhood, the structure of the interference mechanism, and how the treatment was distributed in their neighborhood. In this work, we introduce a sequential procedure to generate and select graph- and treatment-based covariates for GATE estimation under regression adjustment. We show that it is possible to simultaneously achieve low bias and considerably reduce variance with such a procedure. To tackle inferential complications caused by our feature generation and selection process, we introduce a way to construct confidence intervals based on a block bootstrap. We illustrate that our selection procedure and subsequent estimator can achieve good performance in terms of root mean squared error in several semi-synthetic experiments with Bernoulli designs, comparing favorably to an oracle estimator that takes advantage of regression adjustments for the known underlying interference structure. We apply our method to a real world experimental dataset with strong evidence of interference and demonstrate that it can estimate the GATE reasonably well without knowing the interference process a priori.
Uncertainty analysis in the outcomes of model predictions is a key element in decision-based material design to establish confidence in the models and evaluate the fidelity of models. Uncertainty Propagation (UP) is a technique to determine model output uncertainties based on the uncertainty in its input variables. The most common and simplest approach to propagate the uncertainty from a model inputs to its outputs is by feeding a large number of samples to the model, known as Monte Carlo (MC) simulation which requires exhaustive sampling from the input variable distributions. However, MC simulations are impractical when models are computationally expensive. In this work, we investigate the hypothesis that while all samples are useful on average, some samples must be more useful than others. Thus, reordering MC samples and propagating more useful samples can lead to enhanced convergence in statistics of interest earlier and thus, reducing the computational burden of UP process. Here, we introduce a methodology to adaptively reorder MC samples and show how it results in reduction of computational expense of UP processes.
Given an observational study with $n$ independent but heterogeneous units, our goal is to learn the counterfactual distribution for each unit using only one $p$-dimensional sample per unit containing covariates, interventions, and outcomes. Specifically, we allow for unobserved confounding that introduces statistical biases between interventions and outcomes as well as exacerbates the heterogeneity across units. Modeling the underlying joint distribution as an exponential family, we reduce learning the unit-level counterfactual distributions to learning $n$ exponential family distributions with heterogeneous parameters and only one sample per distribution. We introduce a convex objective that pools all $n$ samples to jointly learn all $n$ parameter vectors, and provide a unit-wise mean squared error bound that scales linearly with the metric entropy of the parameter space. For example, when the parameters are $s$-sparse linear combination of $k$ known vectors, the error is $O(s\log k/p)$. En route, we derive sufficient conditions for compactly supported distributions to satisfy the logarithmic Sobolev inequality. As an application of the framework, our results enable consistent imputation of sparsely missing covariates.