We analyze the problem of simultaneous support recovery and estimation of the coefficient vector ($\beta^*$) in a linear model with independent and identically distributed Normal errors. We apply the penalized least square estimator based on non-linear penalties of stochastic gates (STG) [YLNK20] to estimate the coefficients. Considering Gaussian design matrices we show that under reasonable conditions on dimension and sparsity of $\beta^*$ the STG based estimator converges to the true data generating coefficient vector and also detects its support set with high probability. We propose a new projection based algorithm for linear models setup to improve upon the existing STG estimator that was originally designed for general non-linear models. Our new procedure outperforms many classical estimators for support recovery in synthetic data analysis.
We consider a high-dimensional model in which variables are observed over time and space. The model consists of a spatio-temporal regression containing a time lag and a spatial lag of the dependent variable. Unlike classical spatial autoregressive models, we do not rely on a predetermined spatial interaction matrix, but infer all spatial interactions from the data. Assuming sparsity, we estimate the spatial and temporal dependence fully data-driven by penalizing a set of Yule-Walker equations. This regularization can be left unstructured, but we also propose customized shrinkage procedures when observations originate from spatial grids (e.g. satellite images). Finite sample error bounds are derived and estimation consistency is established in an asymptotic framework wherein the sample size and the number of spatial units diverge jointly. Exogenous variables can be included as well. A simulation exercise shows strong finite sample performance compared to competing procedures. As an empirical application, we model satellite measured NO2 concentrations in London. Our approach delivers forecast improvements over a competitive benchmark and we discover evidence for strong spatial interactions.
Pearson's chi-squared test is widely used to test the goodness of fit between categorical data and a given discrete distribution function. When the number of sets of the categorical data, say $k$, is a fixed integer, Pearson's chi-squared test statistic converges in distribution to a chi-squared distribution with $k-1$ degrees of freedom when the sample size $n$ goes to infinity. In real applications, the number $k$ often changes with $n$ and may be even much larger than $n$. By using the martingale techniques, we prove that Pearson's chi-squared test statistic converges to the normal under quite general conditions. We also propose a new test statistic which is more powerful than chi-squared test statistic based on our simulation study. A real application to lottery data is provided to illustrate our methodology.
This paper offers a new approach to address the model uncertainty in (potentially) divergent-dimensional single-index models (SIMs). We propose a model-averaging estimator based on cross-validation, which allows the dimension of covariates and the number of candidate models to increase with the sample size. We show that when all candidate models are misspecified, our model-averaging estimator is asymptotically optimal in the sense that its squared loss is asymptotically identical to that of the infeasible best possible averaging estimator. In a different situation where correct models are available in the model set, the proposed weighting scheme assigns all weights to the correct models in the asymptotic sense. We also extend our method to average regularized estimators and propose pre-screening methods to deal with cases with high-dimensional covariates. We illustrate the merits of our method via simulations and two empirical applications.
Support vector machine (SVM) is a powerful classification method that has achieved great success in many fields. Since its performance can be seriously impaired by redundant covariates, model selection techniques are widely used for SVM with high dimensional covariates. As an alternative to model selection, significant progress has been made in the area of model averaging in the past decades. Yet no frequentist model averaging method was considered for SVM. This work aims to fill the gap and to propose a frequentist model averaging procedure for SVM which selects the optimal weight by cross validation. Even when the number of covariates diverges at an exponential rate of the sample size, we show asymptotic optimality of the proposed method in the sense that the ratio of its hinge loss to the lowest possible loss converges to one. We also derive the convergence rate which provides more insights to model averaging. Compared to model selection methods of SVM which require a tedious but critical task of tuning parameter selection, the model averaging method avoids the task and shows promising performances in the empirical studies.
Motivated by the problem of online canonical correlation analysis, we propose the \emph{Stochastic Scaled-Gradient Descent} (SSGD) algorithm for minimizing the expectation of a stochastic function over a generic Riemannian manifold. SSGD generalizes the idea of projected stochastic gradient descent and allows the use of scaled stochastic gradients instead of stochastic gradients. In the special case of a spherical constraint, which arises in generalized eigenvector problems, we establish a nonasymptotic finite-sample bound of $\sqrt{1/T}$, and show that this rate is minimax optimal, up to a polylogarithmic factor of relevant parameters. On the asymptotic side, a novel trajectory-averaging argument allows us to achieve local asymptotic normality with a rate that matches that of Ruppert-Polyak-Juditsky averaging. We bring these ideas together in an application to online canonical correlation analysis, deriving, for the first time in the literature, an optimal one-time-scale algorithm with an explicit rate of local asymptotic convergence to normality. Numerical studies of canonical correlation analysis are also provided for synthetic data.
The stochastic dynamic matching problem has recently drawn attention in the stochastic-modeling community due to its numerous applications, ranging from supply-chain management to kidney exchange programs. In this paper, we consider a matching problem in which items of different classes arrive according to independent Poisson processes. Unmatched items are stored in a queue, and compatibility constraints are described by a simple graph on the classes, so that two items can be matched if their classes are neighbors in the graph. We analyze the efficiency of matching policies, not only in terms of system stability, but also in terms of matching rates between different classes. Our results rely on the observation that, under any stable policy, the matching rates satisfy a conservation equation that equates the arrival and departure rates of each item class. Our main contributions are threefold. We first introduce a mapping between the dimension of the solution set of this conservation equation, the structure of the compatibility graph, and the existence of a stable policy. In particular, this allows us to derive a necessary and sufficient stability condition that is verifiable in polynomial time. Secondly, we describe the convex polytope of non-negative solutions of the conservation equation. When this polytope is reduced to a single point, we give a closed-form expression of the solution; in general, we characterize the vertices of this polytope using again the graph structure. Lastly, we show that greedy policies cannot, in general, achieve every point in the polytope. In contrast, non-greedy policies can reach any point of the interior of this polytope, and we give a condition for these policies to also reach the boundary of the polytope.
Analysis and use of stochastic models represented by a discrete-time Markov Chain require evaluation of performance measures and characterization of its stationary distribution. Analytical solutions are often unavailable when the system states are continuous or mixed. This paper presents a new method for computing the stationary distribution and performance measures for stochastic systems represented by continuous-, or mixed-state Markov chains. We show the asymptotic convergence and provide deterministic non-asymptotic error bounds for our method under the supremum norm. Our finite approximation method is near-optimal among all discrete approximate distributions, including empirical distributions obtained from Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). Numerical experiments validate the accuracy and efficiency of our method and show that it significantly outperforms MCMC based approach.
For supervised classification problems, this paper considers estimating the query's label probability through local regression using observed covariates. Well-known nonparametric kernel smoother and $k$-nearest neighbor ($k$-NN) estimator, which take label average over a ball around the query, are consistent but asymptotically biased particularly for a large radius of the ball. To eradicate such bias, local polynomial regression (LPoR) and multiscale $k$-NN (MS-$k$-NN) learn the bias term by local regression around the query and extrapolate it to the query itself. However, their theoretical optimality has been shown for the limit of the infinite number of training samples. For correcting the asymptotic bias with fewer observations, this paper proposes a local radial regression (LRR) and its logistic regression variant called local radial logistic regression (LRLR), by combining the advantages of LPoR and MS-$k$-NN. The idea is simple: we fit the local regression to observed labels by taking the radial distance as the explanatory variable and then extrapolate the estimated label probability to zero distance. Our numerical experiments, including real-world datasets of daily stock indices, demonstrate that LRLR outperforms LPoR and MS-$k$-NN.
We propose a new method of estimation in topic models, that is not a variation on the existing simplex finding algorithms, and that estimates the number of topics K from the observed data. We derive new finite sample minimax lower bounds for the estimation of A, as well as new upper bounds for our proposed estimator. We describe the scenarios where our estimator is minimax adaptive. Our finite sample analysis is valid for any number of documents (n), individual document length (N_i), dictionary size (p) and number of topics (K), and both p and K are allowed to increase with n, a situation not handled well by previous analyses. We complement our theoretical results with a detailed simulation study. We illustrate that the new algorithm is faster and more accurate than the current ones, although we start out with a computational and theoretical disadvantage of not knowing the correct number of topics K, while we provide the competing methods with the correct value in our simulations.
We develop an approach to risk minimization and stochastic optimization that provides a convex surrogate for variance, allowing near-optimal and computationally efficient trading between approximation and estimation error. Our approach builds off of techniques for distributionally robust optimization and Owen's empirical likelihood, and we provide a number of finite-sample and asymptotic results characterizing the theoretical performance of the estimator. In particular, we show that our procedure comes with certificates of optimality, achieving (in some scenarios) faster rates of convergence than empirical risk minimization by virtue of automatically balancing bias and variance. We give corroborating empirical evidence showing that in practice, the estimator indeed trades between variance and absolute performance on a training sample, improving out-of-sample (test) performance over standard empirical risk minimization for a number of classification problems.