Nested error regression models are commonly used to incorporate observational unit specific auxiliary variables to improve small area estimates. When the mean structure of this model is misspecified, there is generally an increase in the mean square prediction error (MSPE) of Empirical Best Linear Unbiased Predictors (EBLUP). Observed Best Prediction (OBP) method has been proposed with the intent to improve on the MSPE over EBLUP. We conduct a Monte Carlo simulation experiment to understand the effect of mispsecification of mean structures on different small area estimators. Our simulation results lead to an unexpected result that OBP may perform very poorly when observational unit level auxiliary variables are used and that OBP can be improved significantly when population means of those auxiliary variables (area level auxiliary variables) are used in the nested error regression model or when a corresponding area level model is used. Our simulation also indicates that the MSPE of OBP in an increasing function of the difference between the sample and population means of the auxiliary variables.
Linear structural vector autoregressive models can be identified statistically without imposing restrictions on the model if the shocks are mutually independent and at most one of them is Gaussian. We show that this result extends to structural threshold and smooth transition vector autoregressive models incorporating a time-varying impact matrix defined as a weighted sum of the impact matrices of the regimes. Our empirical application studies the effects of the climate policy uncertainty shock on the U.S. macroeconomy. In a structural logistic smooth transition vector autoregressive model consisting of two regimes, we find that a positive climate policy uncertainty shock decreases production in times of low economic policy uncertainty but slightly increases it in times of high economic policy uncertainty. The introduced methods are implemented to the accompanying R package sstvars.
In evidence synthesis, effect modifiers are typically described as variables that induce treatment effect heterogeneity at the individual level, through treatment-covariate interactions in an outcome model parametrized at such level. As such, effect modification is defined with respect to a conditional measure, but marginal effect estimates are required for population-level decisions in health technology assessment. For non-collapsible measures, purely prognostic variables that are not determinants of treatment response at the individual level may modify marginal effects, even where there is individual-level treatment effect homogeneity. With heterogeneity, marginal effects for measures that are not directly collapsible cannot be expressed in terms of marginal covariate moments, and generally depend on the joint distribution of conditional effect measure modifiers and purely prognostic variables. There are implications for recommended practices in evidence synthesis. Unadjusted anchored indirect comparisons can be biased in the absence of individual-level treatment effect heterogeneity, or when marginal covariate moments are balanced across studies. Covariate adjustment may be necessary to account for cross-study imbalances in joint covariate distributions involving purely prognostic variables. In the absence of individual patient data for the target, covariate adjustment approaches are inherently limited in their ability to remove bias for measures that are not directly collapsible. Directly collapsible measures would facilitate the transportability of marginal effects between studies by: (1) reducing dependence on model-based covariate adjustment where there is individual-level treatment effect homogeneity or marginal covariate moments are balanced; and (2) facilitating the selection of baseline covariates for adjustment where there is individual-level treatment effect heterogeneity.
This contribution extends the localized training approach, traditionally employed for multiscale problems and parameterized partial differential equations (PDEs) featuring locally heterogeneous coefficients, to the class of linear, positive symmetric operators, known as Friedrichs' operators. Considering a local subdomain with corresponding oversampling domain we prove the compactness of the transfer operator which maps boundary data to solutions on the interior domain. While a Caccioppoli-inequality quantifying the energy decay to the interior holds true for all Friedrichs' systems, showing a compactness result for the graph-spaces hosting the solution is additionally necessary. We discuss the mixed formulation of a convection-diffusion-reaction problem where the necessary compactness result is obtained by the Picard-Weck-Weber theorem. Our numerical results, focusing on a scenario involving heterogeneous diffusion fields with multiple high-conductivity channels, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Modern regression applications can involve hundreds or thousands of variables which motivates the use of variable selection methods. Bayesian variable selection defines a posterior distribution on the possible subsets of the variables (which are usually termed models) to express uncertainty about which variables are strongly linked to the response. This can be used to provide Bayesian model averaged predictions or inference, and to understand the relative importance of different variables. However, there has been little work on meaningful representations of this uncertainty beyond first order summaries. We introduce Cartesian credible sets to address this gap. The elements of these sets are formed by concatenating sub-models defined on each block of a partition of the variables. Investigating these sub-models allow us to understand whether the models in the Cartesian credible set always/never/sometimes include a particular variable or group of variables and provide a useful summary of model uncertainty. We introduce methods to find these sets that emphasize ease of understanding. The potential of the method is illustrated on regression problems with both small and large numbers of variables.
High-dimensional, higher-order tensor data are gaining prominence in a variety of fields, including but not limited to computer vision and network analysis. Tensor factor models, induced from noisy versions of tensor decompositions or factorizations, are natural potent instruments to study a collection of tensor-variate objects that may be dependent or independent. However, it is still in the early stage of developing statistical inferential theories for the estimation of various low-rank structures, which are customary to play the role of signals of tensor factor models. In this paper, we attempt to ``decode" the estimation of a higher-order tensor factor model by leveraging tensor matricization. Specifically, we recast it into mode-wise traditional high-dimensional vector/fiber factor models, enabling the deployment of conventional principal components analysis (PCA) for estimation. Demonstrated by the Tucker tensor factor model (TuTFaM), which is induced from the noisy version of the widely-used Tucker decomposition, we summarize that estimations on signal components are essentially mode-wise PCA techniques, and the involvement of projection and iteration will enhance the signal-to-noise ratio to various extent. We establish the inferential theory of the proposed estimators, conduct rich simulation experiments, and illustrate how the proposed estimations can work in tensor reconstruction, and clustering for independent video and dependent economic datasets, respectively.
Two sequential estimators are proposed for the odds p/(1-p) and log odds log(p/(1-p)) respectively, using independent Bernoulli random variables with parameter p as inputs. The estimators are unbiased, and guarantee that the variance of the estimation error divided by the true value of the odds, or the variance of the estimation error of the log odds, are less than a target value for any p in (0,1). The estimators are close to optimal in the sense of Wolfowitz's bound.
Logistic regression is widely used in many areas of knowledge. Several works compare the performance of lasso and maximum likelihood estimation in logistic regression. However, part of these works do not perform simulation studies and the remaining ones do not consider scenarios in which the ratio of the number of covariates to sample size is high. In this work, we compare the discrimination performance of lasso and maximum likelihood estimation in logistic regression using simulation studies and applications. Variable selection is done both by lasso and by stepwise when maximum likelihood estimation is used. We consider a wide range of values for the ratio of the number of covariates to sample size. The main conclusion of the work is that lasso has a better discrimination performance than maximum likelihood estimation when the ratio of the number of covariates to sample size is high.
We argue that the success of reservoir computing lies within the separation capacity of the reservoirs and show that the expected separation capacity of random linear reservoirs is fully characterised by the spectral decomposition of an associated generalised matrix of moments. Of particular interest are reservoirs with Gaussian matrices that are either symmetric or whose entries are all independent. In the symmetric case, we prove that the separation capacity always deteriorates with time; while for short inputs, separation with large reservoirs is best achieved when the entries of the matrix are scaled with a factor $\rho_T/\sqrt{N}$, where $N$ is the dimension of the reservoir and $\rho_T$ depends on the maximum length of the input time series. In the i.i.d. case, we establish that optimal separation with large reservoirs is consistently achieved when the entries of the reservoir matrix are scaled with the exact factor $1/\sqrt{N}$. We further give upper bounds on the quality of separation in function of the length of the time series. We complement this analysis with an investigation of the likelihood of this separation and the impact of the chosen architecture on separation consistency.
The concept of shift is often invoked to describe directional differences in statistical moments but has not yet been established as a property of individual distributions. In the present study, we define distributional shift (DS) as the concentration of frequencies towards the lowest discrete class and derive its measurement from the sum of cumulative frequencies. We use empirical datasets to demonstrate DS as an advantageous measure of ecological rarity and as a generalisable measure of poverty and scarcity. We then define relative distributional shift (RDS) as the difference in DS between distributions, yielding a uniquely signed (i.e., directional) measure. Using simulated random sampling, we show that RDS is closely related to measures of distance, divergence, intersection, and probabilistic scoring. We apply RDS to image analysis by demonstrating its performance in the detection of light events, changes in complex patterns, patterns within visual noise, and colour shifts. Altogether, DS is an intuitive statistical property that underpins a uniquely useful comparative measure.
Hashing has been widely used in approximate nearest search for large-scale database retrieval for its computation and storage efficiency. Deep hashing, which devises convolutional neural network architecture to exploit and extract the semantic information or feature of images, has received increasing attention recently. In this survey, several deep supervised hashing methods for image retrieval are evaluated and I conclude three main different directions for deep supervised hashing methods. Several comments are made at the end. Moreover, to break through the bottleneck of the existing hashing methods, I propose a Shadow Recurrent Hashing(SRH) method as a try. Specifically, I devise a CNN architecture to extract the semantic features of images and design a loss function to encourage similar images projected close. To this end, I propose a concept: shadow of the CNN output. During optimization process, the CNN output and its shadow are guiding each other so as to achieve the optimal solution as much as possible. Several experiments on dataset CIFAR-10 show the satisfying performance of SRH.