We introduce a new methodology for two-sample testing of high-dimensional linear regression coefficients without assuming that those coefficients are individually estimable. The procedure works by first projecting the matrices of covariates and response vectors along directions that are complementary in sign in a subset of the coordinates, a process which we call 'complementary sketching'. The resulting projected covariates and responses are aggregated to form two test statistics. We show that our procedure has essentially optimal asymptotic power under Gaussian designs with a general class of design covariance matrices when the difference between the two regression coefficients is sparse and dense respectively. Simulations confirm that our methods perform well in a broad class of settings.
The goal of a typical adaptive sequential decision making problem is to design an interactive policy that selects a group of items sequentially, based on some partial observations, to maximize the expected utility. It has been shown that the utility functions of many real-world applications, including pooled-based active learning and adaptive influence maximization, satisfy the property of adaptive submodularity. However, most of existing studies on adaptive submodular maximization focus on the fully adaptive setting, i.e., one must wait for the feedback from \emph{all} past selections before making the next selection. Although this approach can take full advantage of feedback from the past to make informed decisions, it may take a longer time to complete the selection process as compared with the non-adaptive solution where all selections are made in advance before any observations take place. In this paper, we explore the problem of partial-adaptive submodular maximization where one is allowed to make multiple selections in a batch simultaneously and observe their realizations together. Our approach enjoys the benefits of adaptivity while reducing the time spent on waiting for the observations from past selections. To the best of our knowledge, no results are known for partial-adaptive policies for the non-monotone adaptive submodular maximization problem. We study this problem under both cardinality constraint and knapsack constraints, and develop effective and efficient solutions for both cases. We also analyze the batch query complexity, i.e., the number of batches a policy takes to complete the selection process, of our policy under some additional assumptions.
This paper considers the problem of estimating high dimensional Laplacian constrained precision matrices by minimizing Stein's loss. We obtain a necessary and sufficient condition for existence of this estimator, that boils down to checking whether a certain data dependent graph is connected. We also prove consistency in the high dimensional setting under the symmetryzed Stein loss. We show that the error rate does not depend on the graph sparsity, or other type of structure, and that Laplacian constraints are sufficient for high dimensional consistency. Our proofs exploit properties of graph Laplacians, and a characterization of the proposed estimator based on effective graph resistances. We validate our theoretical claims with numerical experiments.
We investigate the calibration of estimations to increase performance with an optimal monotone transform on the estimator outputs. We start by studying the traditional square error setting with its weighted variant and show that the optimal monotone transform is in the form of a unique staircase function. We further show that this staircase behavior is preserved for general strictly convex loss functions. Their optimal monotone transforms are also unique, i.e., there exist a single staircase transform that achieves the minimum loss. We propose a linear time and space algorithm that can find such optimal transforms for specific loss settings. Our algorithm has an online implementation where the optimal transform for the samples observed so far are found in linear space and amortized time when the samples arrive in an ordered fashion. We also extend our results to cases where the functions are not trivial to individually optimize and propose an anytime algorithm, which has linear space and pseudo-linearithmic time complexity.
In real word applications, data generating process for training a machine learning model often differs from what the model encounters in the test stage. Understanding how and whether machine learning models generalize under such distributional shifts have been a theoretical challenge. Here, we study generalization in kernel regression when the training and test distributions are different using methods from statistical physics. Using the replica method, we derive an analytical formula for the out-of-distribution generalization error applicable to any kernel and real datasets. We identify an overlap matrix that quantifies the mismatch between distributions for a given kernel as a key determinant of generalization performance under distribution shift. Using our analytical expressions we elucidate various generalization phenomena including possible improvement in generalization when there is a mismatch. We develop procedures for optimizing training and test distributions for a given data budget to find best and worst case generalizations under the shift. We present applications of our theory to real and synthetic datasets and for many kernels. We compare results of our theory applied to Neural Tangent Kernel with simulations of wide networks and show agreement. We analyze linear regression in further depth.
We propose two robust methods for testing hypotheses on unknown parameters of predictive regression models under heterogeneous and persistent volatility as well as endogenous, persistent and/or fat-tailed regressors and errors. The proposed robust testing approaches are applicable both in the case of discrete and continuous time models. Both of the methods use the Cauchy estimator to effectively handle the problems of endogeneity, persistence and/or fat-tailedness in regressors and errors. The difference between our two methods is how the heterogeneous volatility is controlled. The first method relies on robust t-statistic inference using group estimators of a regression parameter of interest proposed in Ibragimov and Muller, 2010. It is simple to implement, but requires the exogenous volatility assumption. To relax the exogenous volatility assumption, we propose another method which relies on the nonparametric correction of volatility. The proposed methods perform well compared with widely used alternative inference procedures in terms of their finite sample properties.
In this paper, we establish minimax optimal rates of convergence for prediction in a semi-functional linear model that consists of a functional component and a less smooth nonparametric component. Our results reveal that the smoother functional component can be learned with the minimax rate as if the nonparametric component were known. More specifically, a double-penalized least squares method is adopted to estimate both the functional and nonparametric components within the framework of reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces. By virtue of the representer theorem, an efficient algorithm that requires no iterations is proposed to solve the corresponding optimization problem, where the regularization parameters are selected by the generalized cross validation criterion. Numerical studies are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method and to verify the theoretical analysis.
We consider the problem of testing for long-range dependence for time-varying coefficient regression models. The covariates and errors are assumed to be locally stationary, which allows complex temporal dynamics and heteroscedasticity. We develop KPSS, R/S, V/S, and K/S-type statistics based on the nonparametric residuals, and propose bootstrap approaches equipped with a difference-based long-run covariance matrix estimator for practical implementation. Under the null hypothesis, the local alternatives as well as the fixed alternatives, we derive the limiting distributions of the test statistics, establish the uniform consistency of the difference-based long-run covariance estimator, and justify the bootstrap algorithms theoretically. In particular, the exact local asymptotic power of our testing procedure enjoys the order $O( \log^{-1} n)$, the same as that of the classical KPSS test for long memory in strictly stationary series without covariates. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our tests by extensive simulation studies. The proposed tests are applied to a COVID-19 dataset in favor of long-range dependence in the cumulative confirmed series of COVID-19 in several countries, and to the Hong Kong circulatory and respiratory dataset, identifying a new type of 'spurious long memory'.
Convex regression is the problem of fitting a convex function to a data set consisting of input-output pairs. We present a new approach to this problem called spectrahedral regression, in which we fit a spectrahedral function to the data, i.e. a function that is the maximum eigenvalue of an affine matrix expression of the input. This method represents a significant generalization of polyhedral (also called max-affine) regression, in which a polyhedral function (a maximum of a fixed number of affine functions) is fit to the data. We prove bounds on how well spectrahedral functions can approximate arbitrary convex functions via statistical risk analysis. We also analyze an alternating minimization algorithm for the non-convex optimization problem of fitting the best spectrahedral function to a given data set. We show that this algorithm converges geometrically with high probability to a small ball around the optimal parameter given a good initialization. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of our approach with experiments on synthetic data sets as well as real data arising in applications such as economics and engineering design.
This paper presents an efficient reversible algorithm for linear regression, both with and without ridge regression. Our reversible algorithm matches the asymptotic time and space complexity of standard irreversible algorithms for this problem. Needed for this result is the expansion of the analysis of efficient reversible matrix multiplication to rectangular matrices and matrix inversion.
We show that for the problem of testing if a matrix $A \in F^{n \times n}$ has rank at most $d$, or requires changing an $\epsilon$-fraction of entries to have rank at most $d$, there is a non-adaptive query algorithm making $\widetilde{O}(d^2/\epsilon)$ queries. Our algorithm works for any field $F$. This improves upon the previous $O(d^2/\epsilon^2)$ bound (SODA'03), and bypasses an $\Omega(d^2/\epsilon^2)$ lower bound of (KDD'14) which holds if the algorithm is required to read a submatrix. Our algorithm is the first such algorithm which does not read a submatrix, and instead reads a carefully selected non-adaptive pattern of entries in rows and columns of $A$. We complement our algorithm with a matching query complexity lower bound for non-adaptive testers over any field. We also give tight bounds of $\widetilde{\Theta}(d^2)$ queries in the sensing model for which query access comes in the form of $\langle X_i, A\rangle:=tr(X_i^\top A)$; perhaps surprisingly these bounds do not depend on $\epsilon$. We next develop a novel property testing framework for testing numerical properties of a real-valued matrix $A$ more generally, which includes the stable rank, Schatten-$p$ norms, and SVD entropy. Specifically, we propose a bounded entry model, where $A$ is required to have entries bounded by $1$ in absolute value. We give upper and lower bounds for a wide range of problems in this model, and discuss connections to the sensing model above.