This paper presents asymptotic results for the maximum likelihood and restricted maximum likelihood (REML) estimators within a two-way crossed mixed effect model as the sizes of the rows, columns, and cells tend to infinity. Under very mild conditions which do not require the assumption of normality, the estimators are proven to be asymptotically normal, possessing a structured covariance matrix. The growth rate for the number of rows, columns, and cells is unrestricted, whether considered pairwise or collectively.
Compositional data arise in many areas of research in the natural and biomedical sciences. One prominent example is in the study of the human gut microbiome, where one can measure the relative abundance of many distinct microorganisms in a subject's gut. Often, practitioners are interested in learning how the dependencies between microbes vary across distinct populations or experimental conditions. In statistical terms, the goal is to estimate a covariance matrix for the (latent) log-abundances of the microbes in each of the populations. However, the compositional nature of the data prevents the use of standard estimators for these covariance matrices. In this article, we propose an estimator of multiple covariance matrices which allows for information sharing across distinct populations of samples. Compared to some existing estimators, which estimate the covariance matrices of interest indirectly, our estimator is direct, ensures positive definiteness, and is the solution to a convex optimization problem. We compute our estimator using a proximal-proximal gradient descent algorithm. Asymptotic properties of our estimator reveal that it can perform well in high-dimensional settings. Through simulation studies, we demonstrate that our estimator can outperform existing estimators. We show that our method provides more reliable estimates than competitors in an analysis of microbiome data from subjects with chronic fatigue syndrome.
Calls to make scientific research more open have gained traction with a range of societal stakeholders. Open Science practices include but are not limited to the early sharing of results via preprints and openly sharing outputs such as data and code to make research more reproducible and extensible. Existing evidence shows that adopting Open Science practices has effects in several domains. In this study, we investigate whether adopting one or more Open Science practices leads to significantly higher citations for an associated publication, which is one form of academic impact. We use a novel dataset known as Open Science Indicators, produced by PLOS and DataSeer, which includes all PLOS publications from 2018 to 2023 as well as a comparison group sampled from the PMC Open Access Subset. In total, we analyze circa 122'000 publications. We calculate publication and author-level citation indicators and use a broad set of control variables to isolate the effect of Open Science Indicators on received citations. We show that Open Science practices are adopted to different degrees across scientific disciplines. We find that the early release of a publication as a preprint correlates with a significant positive citation advantage of about 20.2% on average. We also find that sharing data in an online repository correlates with a smaller yet still positive citation advantage of 4.3% on average. However, we do not find a significant citation advantage for sharing code. Further research is needed on additional or alternative measures of impact beyond citations. Our results are likely to be of interest to researchers, as well as publishers, research funders, and policymakers.
The implication problem for conditional independence (CI) asks whether the fact that a probability distribution obeys a given finite set of CI relations implies that a further CI statement also holds in this distribution. This problem has a long and fascinating history, cumulating in positive results about implications now known as the semigraphoid axioms as well as impossibility results about a general finite characterization of CI implications. Motivated by violation of faithfulness assumptions in causal discovery, we study the implication problem in the special setting where the CI relations are obtained from a directed acyclic graphical (DAG) model along with one additional CI statement. Focusing on the Gaussian case, we give a complete characterization of when such an implication is graphical by using algebraic techniques. Moreover, prompted by the relevance of strong faithfulness in statistical guarantees for causal discovery algorithms, we give a graphical solution for an approximate CI implication problem, in which we ask whether small values of one additional partial correlation entail small values for yet a further partial correlation.
Hierarchical matrices approximate a given matrix by a decomposition into low-rank submatrices that can be handled efficiently in factorized form. $\mathcal{H}^2$-matrices refine this representation following the ideas of fast multipole methods in order to achieve linear, i.e., optimal complexity for a variety of important algorithms. The matrix multiplication, a key component of many more advanced numerical algorithms, has so far proven tricky: the only linear-time algorithms known so far either require the very special structure of HSS-matrices or need to know a suitable basis for all submatrices in advance. In this article, a new and fairly general algorithm for multiplying $\mathcal{H}^2$-matrices in linear complexity with adaptively constructed bases is presented. The algorithm consists of two phases: first an intermediate representation with a generalized block structure is constructed, then this representation is re-compressed in order to match the structure prescribed by the application. The complexity and accuracy are analysed and numerical experiments indicate that the new algorithm can indeed be significantly faster than previous attempts.
This paper presents a novel generic asymptotic expansion formula of expectations of multidimensional Wiener functionals through a Malliavin calculus technique. The uniform estimate of the asymptotic expansion is shown under a weaker condition on the Malliavin covariance matrix of the target Wiener functional. In particular, the method provides a tractable expansion for the expectation of an irregular functional of the solution to a multidimensional rough differential equation driven by fractional Brownian motion with Hurst index $H<1/2$, without using complicated fractional integral calculus for the singular kernel. In a numerical experiment, our expansion shows a much better approximation for a probability distribution function than its normal approximation, which demonstrates the validity of the proposed method.
This paper focuses on investigating Stein's invariant shrinkage estimators for large sample covariance matrices and precision matrices in high-dimensional settings. We consider models that have nearly arbitrary population covariance matrices, including those with potential spikes. By imposing mild technical assumptions, we establish the asymptotic limits of the shrinkers for a wide range of loss functions. A key contribution of this work, enabling the derivation of the limits of the shrinkers, is a novel result concerning the asymptotic distributions of the non-spiked eigenvectors of the sample covariance matrices, which can be of independent interest.
In this paper a set of previous general results for the development of B--series for a broad class of stochastic differential equations has been collected. The applicability of these results is demonstrated by the derivation of B--series for non-autonomous semi-linear SDEs and exponential Runge-Kutta methods applied to this class of SDEs, which is a significant generalization of existing theory on such methods.
Random utility maximisation (RUM) models are one of the cornerstones of discrete choice modelling. However, specifying the utility function of RUM models is not straightforward and has a considerable impact on the resulting interpretable outcomes and welfare measures. In this paper, we propose a new discrete choice model based on artificial neural networks (ANNs) named "Alternative-Specific and Shared weights Neural Network (ASS-NN)", which provides a further balance between flexible utility approximation from the data and consistency with two assumptions: RUM theory and fungibility of money (i.e., "one euro is one euro"). Therefore, the ASS-NN can derive economically-consistent outcomes, such as marginal utilities or willingness to pay, without explicitly specifying the utility functional form. Using a Monte Carlo experiment and empirical data from the Swissmetro dataset, we show that ASS-NN outperforms (in terms of goodness of fit) conventional multinomial logit (MNL) models under different utility specifications. Furthermore, we show how the ASS-NN is used to derive marginal utilities and willingness to pay measures.
The complexity of the list homomorphism problem for signed graphs appears difficult to classify. Existing results focus on special classes of signed graphs, such as trees and reflexive signed graphs. Irreflexive signed graphs are in a certain sense the heart of the problem, as noted by a recent paper of Kim and Siggers. We focus on a special class of irreflexive signed graphs, namely those in which the unicoloured edges form a spanning path or cycle, which we call separable signed graphs. We classify the complexity of list homomorphisms to these separable signed graphs; we believe that these signed graphs will play an important role for the general resolution of the irreflexive case. We also relate our results to a conjecture of Kim and Siggers concerning the special case of semi-balanced irreflexive signed graphs; we have proved the conjecture in another paper, and the present results add structural information to that topic.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in solving graph classification tasks. However, most GNN architectures aggregate information from all nodes and edges in a graph, regardless of their relevance to the task at hand, thus hindering the interpretability of their predictions. In contrast to prior work, in this paper we propose a GNN \emph{training} approach that jointly i) finds the most predictive subgraph by removing edges and/or nodes -- -\emph{without making assumptions about the subgraph structure} -- while ii) optimizing the performance of the graph classification task. To that end, we rely on reinforcement learning to solve the resulting bi-level optimization with a reward function based on conformal predictions to account for the current in-training uncertainty of the classifier. Our empirical results on nine different graph classification datasets show that our method competes in performance with baselines while relying on significantly sparser subgraphs, leading to more interpretable GNN-based predictions.