Testing the equality of the covariance matrices of two high-dimensional samples is a fundamental inference problem in statistics. Several tests have been proposed but they are either too liberal or too conservative when the required assumptions are not satisfied which attests that they are not always applicable in real data analysis. To overcome this difficulty, a normal-reference test is proposed and studied in this paper. It is shown that under some regularity conditions and the null hypothesis, the proposed test statistic and a chi-square-type mixture have the same limiting distribution. It is then justified to approximate the null distribution of the proposed test statistic using that of the chi-square-type mixture. The distribution of the chi-square-type mixture can be well approximated using a three-cumulant matched chi-square-approximation with its approximation parameters consistently estimated from the data. The asymptotic power of the proposed test under a local alternative is also established. Simulation studies and a real data example demonstrate that in terms of size control, the proposed test outperforms the existing competitors substantially.
相關內容
We consider the problem of testing the equality of conditional distributions of a response variable given a vector of covariates between two populations. Such a hypothesis testing problem can be motivated from various machine learning and statistical inference scenarios, including transfer learning and causal predictive inference. We develop a nonparametric test procedure inspired from the conformal prediction framework. The construction of our test statistic combines recent developments in conformal prediction with a novel choice of conformity score, resulting in a weighted rank-sum test statistic that is valid and powerful under general settings. To our knowledge, this is the first successful attempt of using conformal prediction for testing statistical hypotheses beyond exchangeability. Our method is suitable for modern machine learning scenarios where the data has high dimensionality and large sample sizes, and can be effectively combined with existing classification algorithms to find good conformity score functions. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated in various numerical examples.
We study the problem of designing consistent sequential two-sample tests in a nonparametric setting. Guided by the principle of testing by betting, we reframe this task into that of selecting a sequence of payoff functions that maximize the wealth of a fictitious bettor, betting against the null in a repeated game. In this setting, the relative increase in the bettor's wealth has a precise interpretation as the measure of evidence against the null, and thus our sequential test rejects the null when the wealth crosses an appropriate threshold. We develop a general framework for setting up the betting game for two-sample testing, in which the payoffs are selected by a prediction strategy as data-driven predictable estimates of the witness function associated with the variational representation of some statistical distance measures, such as integral probability metrics (IPMs). We then formally relate the statistical properties of the test~(such as consistency, type-II error exponent and expected sample size) to the regret of the corresponding prediction strategy. We construct a practical sequential two-sample test by instantiating our general strategy with the kernel-MMD metric, and demonstrate its ability to adapt to the difficulty of the unknown alternative through theoretical and empirical results. Our framework is versatile, and easily extends to other problems; we illustrate this by applying our approach to construct consistent tests for the following problems: (i) time-varying two-sample testing with non-exchangeable observations, and (ii) an abstract class of "invariant" testing problems, including symmetry and independence testing.
Estimating the Shannon entropy of a discrete distribution from which we have only observed a small sample is challenging. Estimating other information-theoretic metrics, such as the Kullback-Leibler divergence between two sparsely sampled discrete distributions, is even harder. Existing approaches to address these problems have shortcomings: they are biased, heuristic, work only for some distributions, and/or cannot be applied to all information-theoretic metrics. Here, we propose a fast, semi-analytical estimator for sparsely sampled distributions that is efficient, precise, and general. Its derivation is grounded in probabilistic considerations and uses a hierarchical Bayesian approach to extract as much information as possible from the few observations available. Our approach provides estimates of the Shannon entropy with precision at least comparable to the state of the art, and most often better. It can also be used to obtain accurate estimates of any other information-theoretic metric, including the notoriously challenging Kullback-Leibler divergence. Here, again, our approach performs consistently better than existing estimators.
The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve is a powerful statistical tool and has been widely applied in medical research. In the ROC curve estimation, a commonly used assumption is that larger the biomarker value, greater severity the disease. In this paper, we mathematically interpret ``greater severity of the disease" as ``larger probability of being diseased". This in turn is equivalent to assume the likelihood ratio ordering of the biomarker between the diseased and healthy individuals. With this assumption, we first propose a Bernstein polynomial method to model the distributions of both samples; we then estimate the distributions by the maximum empirical likelihood principle. The ROC curve estimate and the associated summary statistics are obtained subsequently. Theoretically, we establish the asymptotic consistency of our estimators. Via extensive numerical studies, we compare the performance of our method with competitive methods. The application of our method is illustrated by a real-data example.
This work introduces a refinement of the Parsimonious Model for fitting a Gaussian Mixture. The improvement is based on the consideration of groupings of the covariance matrices according to a criterion, such as sharing Principal Directions. This and other similarity criteria that arise from the spectral decomposition of a matrix are the bases of the Parsimonious Model. The classification can be achieved with simple modifications of the CEM (Classification Expectation Maximization) algorithm, using in the M step suitable estimation methods known for parsimonious models. This approach leads to propose Gaussian Mixture Models for model-based clustering and discriminant analysis, in which covariance matrices are clustered according to a parsimonious criterion, creating intermediate steps between the fourteen widely known parsimonious models. The added versatility not only allows us to obtain models with fewer parameters for fitting the data, but also provides greater interpretability. We show its usefulness for model-based clustering and discriminant analysis, providing algorithms to find approximate solutions verifying suitable size, shape and orientation constraints, and applying them to both simulation and real data examples.
Solving high-dimensional Bayesian inverse problems (BIPs) with the variational inference (VI) method is promising but still challenging. The main difficulties arise from two aspects. First, VI methods approximate the posterior distribution using a simple and analytic variational distribution, which makes it difficult to estimate complex spatially-varying parameters in practice. Second, VI methods typically rely on gradient-based optimization, which can be computationally expensive or intractable when applied to BIPs involving partial differential equations (PDEs). To address these challenges, we propose a novel approximation method for estimating the high-dimensional posterior distribution. This approach leverages a deep generative model to learn a prior model capable of generating spatially-varying parameters. This enables posterior approximation over the latent variable instead of the complex parameters, thus improving estimation accuracy. Moreover, to accelerate gradient computation, we employ a differentiable physics-constrained surrogate model to replace the adjoint method. The proposed method can be fully implemented in an automatic differentiation manner. Numerical examples demonstrate two types of log-permeability estimation for flow in heterogeneous media. The results show the validity, accuracy, and high efficiency of the proposed method.
In mixture modeling and clustering applications, the number of components and clusters is often not known. A stick-breaking mixture model, such as the Dirichlet process mixture model, is an appealing construction that assumes infinitely many components, while shrinking the weights of most of the unused components to near zero. However, it is well-known that this shrinkage is inadequate: even when the component distribution is correctly specified, spurious weights appear and give an inconsistent estimate of the number of clusters. In this article, we propose a simple solution: when breaking each mixture weight stick into two pieces, the length of the second piece is multiplied by a quasi-Bernoulli random variable, taking value one or a small constant close to zero. This effectively creates a soft-truncation and further shrinks the unused weights. Asymptotically, we show that as long as this small constant diminishes to zero at a rate faster than $o(1/n^2)$, with $n$ the sample size, the posterior distribution will converge to the true number of clusters. In comparison, we rigorously explore Dirichlet process mixture models using a concentration parameter that is either constant or rapidly diminishes to zero -- both of which lead to inconsistency for the number of clusters. Our proposed model is easy to implement, requiring only a small modification of a standard Gibbs sampler for mixture models. In simulations and a data application of clustering brain networks, our proposed method recovers the ground-truth number of clusters, and leads to a small number of clusters.
In this work, we study the problem of robustly estimating the mean/location parameter of distributions without moment bounds. For a large class of distributions satisfying natural symmetry constraints we give a sequence of algorithms that can efficiently estimate its location without incurring dimension-dependent factors in the error. Concretely, suppose an adversary can arbitrarily corrupt an $\varepsilon$-fraction of the observed samples. For every $k \in \mathbb{N}$, we design an estimator using time and samples $\tilde{O}({d^k})$ such that the dependence of the error on the corruption level $\varepsilon$ is an additive factor of $O(\varepsilon^{1-\frac{1}{2k}})$. The dependence on other problem parameters is also nearly optimal. Our class contains products of arbitrary symmetric one-dimensional distributions as well as elliptical distributions, a vast generalization of the Gaussian distribution. Examples include product Cauchy distributions and multi-variate $t$-distributions. In particular, even the first moment might not exist. We provide the first efficient algorithms for this class of distributions. Previously, such results where only known under boundedness assumptions on the moments of the distribution and in particular, are provably impossible in the absence of symmetry [KSS18, CTBJ22]. For the class of distributions we consider, all previous estimators either require exponential time or incur error depending on the dimension. Our algorithms are based on a generalization of the filtering technique [DK22]. We show how this machinery can be combined with Huber-loss-based approach to work with projections of the noise. Moreover, we show how sum-of-squares proofs can be used to obtain algorithmic guarantees even for distributions without first moment. We believe that this approach may find other application in future works.
The kernel two-sample test based on the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) is one of the most popular methods for detecting differences between two distributions over general metric spaces. In this paper we propose a method to boost the power of the kernel test by combining MMD estimates over multiple kernels using their Mahalanobis distance. We derive the asymptotic null distribution of the proposed test statistic and use a multiplier bootstrap approach to efficiently compute the rejection region. The resulting test is universally consistent and, since it is obtained by aggregating over a collection of kernels/bandwidths, is more powerful in detecting a wide range of alternatives in finite samples. We also derive the distribution of the test statistic for both fixed and local contiguous alternatives. The latter, in particular, implies that the proposed test is statistically efficient, that is, it has non-trivial asymptotic (Pitman) efficiency. Extensive numerical experiments are performed on both synthetic and real-world datasets to illustrate the efficacy of the proposed method over single kernel tests. Our asymptotic results rely on deriving the joint distribution of MMD estimates using the framework of multiple stochastic integrals, which is more broadly useful, specifically, in understanding the efficiency properties of recently proposed adaptive MMD tests based on kernel aggregation.
While existing work in robust deep learning has focused on small pixel-level $\ell_p$ norm-based perturbations, this may not account for perturbations encountered in several real world settings. In many such cases although test data might not be available, broad specifications about the types of perturbations (such as an unknown degree of rotation) may be known. We consider a setup where robustness is expected over an unseen test domain that is not i.i.d. but deviates from the training domain. While this deviation may not be exactly known, its broad characterization is specified a priori, in terms of attributes. We propose an adversarial training approach which learns to generate new samples so as to maximize exposure of the classifier to the attributes-space, without having access to the data from the test domain. Our adversarial training solves a min-max optimization problem, with the inner maximization generating adversarial perturbations, and the outer minimization finding model parameters by optimizing the loss on adversarial perturbations generated from the inner maximization. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach on three types of naturally occurring perturbations -- object-related shifts, geometric transformations, and common image corruptions. Our approach enables deep neural networks to be robust against a wide range of naturally occurring perturbations. We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed approach by showing the robustness gains of deep neural networks trained using our adversarial training on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and a new variant of the CLEVR dataset.
注冊地址： 北京市海淀區羊坊店路18號2幢3層301-191