This work studies an experimental design problem where {the values of a predictor variable, denoted by $x$}, are to be determined with the goal of estimating a function $m(x)$, which is observed with noise. A linear model is fitted to $m(x)$ but it is not assumed that the model is correctly specified. It follows that the quantity of interest is the best linear approximation of $m(x)$, which is denoted by $\ell(x)$. It is shown that in this framework the ordinary least squares estimator typically leads to an inconsistent estimation of $\ell(x)$, and rather weighted least squares should be considered. An asymptotic minimax criterion is formulated for this estimator, and a design that minimizes the criterion is constructed. An important feature of this problem is that the $x$'s should be random, rather than fixed. Otherwise, the minimax risk is infinite. It is shown that the optimal random minimax design is different from its deterministic counterpart, which was studied previously, and a simulation study indicates that it generally performs better when $m(x)$ is a quadratic or a cubic function. Another finding is that when the variance of the noise goes to infinity, the random and deterministic minimax designs coincide. The results are illustrated for polynomial regression models and the general case is also discussed.
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By exploiting the theory of skew-symmetric distributions, we generalise existing results in sensitivity analysis by providing the analytic expression of the bias induced by marginalization over an unobserved continuous confounder in a logistic regression model. The expression is approximated and mimics Cochran's formula under some simplifying assumptions. Other link functions and error distributions are also considered. A simulation study is performed to assess its properties. The derivations can also be applied in causal mediation analysis, thereby enlarging the number of circumstances where simple parametric formulations can be used to evaluate causal direct and indirect effects. Standard errors of the causal effect estimators are provided via the first-order Delta method. Simulations show that our proposed estimators perform equally well as others based on numerical methods and that the additional interpretability of the explicit formulas does not compromise their precision. The new estimator has been applied to measure the effect of humidity on upper airways diseases mediated by the presence of common aeroallergens in the air.
Equivalence testing allows one to conclude that two characteristics are practically equivalent. We propose a framework for fast sample size determination with Bayesian equivalence tests facilitated via posterior probabilities. We assume that data are generated using statistical models with fixed parameters for the purposes of sample size determination. Our framework leverages an interval-based approach, which defines a distribution for the sample size to control the length of posterior highest density intervals (HDIs). We prove the normality of the limiting distribution for the sample size, and we consider the relationship between posterior HDI length and the statistical power of Bayesian equivalence tests. We introduce two novel approaches for estimating the distribution for the sample size, both of which are calibrated to align with targets for statistical power. Both approaches are much faster than traditional power calculations for Bayesian equivalence tests. Moreover, our method requires users to make fewer choices than traditional simulation-based methods for Bayesian sample size determination. It is therefore more accessible to users accustomed to frequentist methods.
Mendelian randomization (MR) is an instrumental variable (IV) approach to infer causal relationships between exposures and outcomes with genome-wide association studies (GWAS) summary data. However, the multivariable inverse-variance weighting (IVW) approach, which serves as the foundation for most MR approaches, cannot yield unbiased causal effect estimates in the presence of many weak IVs. To address this problem, we proposed the MR using Bias-corrected Estimating Equation (MRBEE) that can infer unbiased causal relationships with many weak IVs and account for horizontal pleiotropy simultaneously. While the practical significance of MRBEE was demonstrated in our parallel work (Lorincz-Comi (2023)), this paper established the statistical theories of multivariable IVW and MRBEE with many weak IVs. First, we showed that the bias of the multivariable IVW estimate is caused by the error-in-variable bias, whose scale and direction are inflated and influenced by weak instrument bias and sample overlaps of exposures and outcome GWAS cohorts, respectively. Second, we investigated the asymptotic properties of multivariable IVW and MRBEE, showing that MRBEE outperforms multivariable IVW regarding unbiasedness of causal effect estimation and asymptotic validity of causal inference. Finally, we applied MRBEE to examine myopia and revealed that education and outdoor activity are causal to myopia whereas indoor activity is not.
In this paper we consider an orthonormal basis, generated by a tensor product of Fourier basis functions, half period cosine basis functions, and the Chebyshev basis functions. We deal with the approximation problem in high dimensions related to this basis and design a fast algorithm to multiply with the underlying matrix, consisting of rows of the non-equidistant Fourier matrix, the non-equidistant cosine matrix and the non-equidistant Chebyshev matrix, and its transposed. This leads us to an ANOVA (analysis of variance) decomposition for functions with partially periodic boundary conditions through using the Fourier basis in some dimensions and the half period cosine basis or the Chebyshev basis in others. We consider sensitivity analysis in this setting, in order to find an adapted basis for the underlying approximation problem. More precisely, we find the underlying index set of the multidimensional series expansion. Additionally, we test this ANOVA approximation with mixed basis at numerical experiments, and refer to the advantage of interpretable results.
This paper presents a novel approach to Bayesian nonparametric spectral analysis of stationary multivariate time series. Starting with a parametric vector-autoregressive model, the parametric likelihood is nonparametrically adjusted in the frequency domain to account for potential deviations from parametric assumptions. We show mutual contiguity of the nonparametrically corrected likelihood, the multivariate Whittle likelihood approximation and the exact likelihood for Gaussian time series. A multivariate extension of the nonparametric Bernstein-Dirichlet process prior for univariate spectral densities to the space of Hermitian positive definite spectral density matrices is specified directly on the correction matrices. An infinite series representation of this prior is then used to develop a Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm to sample from the posterior distribution. The code is made publicly available for ease of use and reproducibility. With this novel approach we provide a generalization of the multivariate Whittle-likelihood-based method of Meier et al. (2020) as well as an extension of the nonparametrically corrected likelihood for univariate stationary time series of Kirch et al. (2019) to the multivariate case. We demonstrate that the nonparametrically corrected likelihood combines the efficiencies of a parametric with the robustness of a nonparametric model. Its numerical accuracy is illustrated in a comprehensive simulation study. We illustrate its practical advantages by a spectral analysis of two environmental time series data sets: a bivariate time series of the Southern Oscillation Index and fish recruitment and time series of windspeed data at six locations in California.
We analyze Newton's method with lazy Hessian updates for solving general possibly non-convex optimization problems. We propose to reuse a previously seen Hessian for several iterations while computing new gradients at each step of the method. This significantly reduces the overall arithmetical complexity of second-order optimization schemes. By using the cubic regularization technique, we establish fast global convergence of our method to a second-order stationary point, while the Hessian does not need to be updated each iteration. For convex problems, we justify global and local superlinear rates for lazy Newton steps with quadratic regularization, which is easier to compute. The optimal frequency for updating the Hessian is once every $d$ iterations, where $d$ is the dimension of the problem. This provably improves the total arithmetical complexity of second-order algorithms by a factor $\sqrt{d}$.
In this paper, we propose and analyze the least squares finite element methods for the linear elasticity interface problem in the stress-displacement system on unfitted meshes. We consider the cases that the interface is $C^2$ or polygonal, and the exact solution $(\sigma,u)$ belongs to $H^s(div; \Omega_0 \cup \Omega_1) \times $H^{1+s}(\Omega_0 \cup \Omega_1)$ with $s > 1/2$. Two types of least squares functionals are defined to seek the numerical solution. The first is defined by simply applying the $L^2$ norm least squares principle, and requires the condition $s \geq 1$. The second is defined with a discrete minus norm, which is related to the inner product in $H^{-1/2}(\Gamma)$. The use of this discrete minus norm results in a method of optimal convergence rates and allows the exact solution has the regularity of any $s > 1/2$. The stability near the interface for both methods is guaranteed by the ghost penalty bilinear forms and we can derive the robust condition number estimates. The convergence rates under $L^2$ norm and the energy norm are derived for both methods. We illustrate the accuracy and the robustness of the proposed methods by a series of numerical experiments for test problems in two and three dimensions.
The design of experiments involves a compromise between covariate balance and robustness. This paper provides a formalization of this trade-off and describes an experimental design that allows experimenters to navigate it. The design is specified by a robustness parameter that bounds the worst-case mean squared error of an estimator of the average treatment effect. Subject to the experimenter's desired level of robustness, the design aims to simultaneously balance all linear functions of potentially many covariates. Less robustness allows for more balance. We show that the mean squared error of the estimator is bounded in finite samples by the minimum of the loss function of an implicit ridge regression of the potential outcomes on the covariates. Asymptotically, the design perfectly balances all linear functions of a growing number of covariates with a diminishing reduction in robustness, effectively allowing experimenters to escape the compromise between balance and robustness in large samples. Finally, we describe conditions that ensure asymptotic normality and provide a conservative variance estimator, which facilitate the construction of asymptotically valid confidence intervals.
We consider finding flat, local minimizers by adding average weight perturbations. Given a nonconvex function $f: \mathbb{R}^d \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ and a $d$-dimensional distribution $\mathcal{P}$ which is symmetric at zero, we perturb the weight of $f$ and define $F(W) = \mathbb{E}[f({W + U})]$, where $U$ is a random sample from $\mathcal{P}$. This injection induces regularization through the Hessian trace of $f$ for small, isotropic Gaussian perturbations. Thus, the weight-perturbed function biases to minimizers with low Hessian trace. Several prior works have studied settings related to this weight-perturbed function by designing algorithms to improve generalization. Still, convergence rates are not known for finding minima under the average perturbations of the function $F$. This paper considers an SGD-like algorithm that injects random noise before computing gradients while leveraging the symmetry of $\mathcal{P}$ to reduce variance. We then provide a rigorous analysis, showing matching upper and lower bounds of our algorithm for finding an approximate first-order stationary point of $F$ when the gradient of $f$ is Lipschitz-continuous. We empirically validate our algorithm for several image classification tasks with various architectures. Compared to sharpness-aware minimization, we note a 12.6% and 7.8% drop in the Hessian trace and top eigenvalue of the found minima, respectively, averaged over eight datasets. Ablation studies validate the benefit of the design of our algorithm.
In this work we connect two notions: That of the nonparametric mode of a probability measure, defined by asymptotic small ball probabilities, and that of the Onsager-Machlup functional, a generalized density also defined via asymptotic small ball probabilities. We show that in a separable Hilbert space setting and under mild conditions on the likelihood, modes of a Bayesian posterior distribution based upon a Gaussian prior exist and agree with the minimizers of its Onsager-Machlup functional and thus also with weak posterior modes. We apply this result to inverse problems and derive conditions on the forward mapping under which this variational characterization of posterior modes holds. Our results show rigorously that in the limit case of infinite-dimensional data corrupted by additive Gaussian or Laplacian noise, nonparametric maximum a posteriori estimation is equivalent to Tikhonov-Phillips regularization. In comparison with the work of Dashti, Law, Stuart, and Voss (2013), the assumptions on the likelihood are relaxed so that they cover in particular the important case of white Gaussian process noise. We illustrate our results by applying them to a severely ill-posed linear problem with Laplacian noise, where we express the maximum a posteriori estimator analytically and study its rate of convergence in the small noise limit.
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