No Arabic abstract
The use of quantiles to obtain insights about multivariate data is addressed. It is argued that incisive insights can be obtained by considering directional quantiles, the quantiles of projections. Directional quantile envelopes are proposed as a way to condense this kind of information; it is demonstrated that they are essentially halfspace (Tukey) depth levels sets, coinciding for elliptic distributions (in particular multivariate normal) with density contours. Relevant questions concerning their indexing, the possibility of the reverse retrieval of directional quantile information, invariance with respect to affine transformations, and approximation/asymptotic properties are studied. It is argued that the analysis in terms of directional quantiles and their envelopes offers a straightforward probabilistic interpretation and thus conveys a concrete quantitative meaning; the directional definition can be adapted to elaborate frameworks, like estimation of extreme quantiles and directional quantile regression, the regression of depth contours on covariates. The latter facilitates the construction of multivariate growth charts---the question that motivated all the development.
The identification of factors associated with mental and behavioral disorders in early childhood is critical both for psychopathology research and the support of primary health care practices. Motivated by the Millennium Cohort Study, in this paper we study the effect of a comprehensive set of covariates on childrens emotional and behavioural trajectories in England. To this end, we develop a Quantile Mixed Hidden Markov Model for joint estimation of multiple quantiles in a linear regression setting for multivariate longitudinal data. The novelty of the proposed approach is based on the Multivariate Asymmetric Laplace distribution which allows to jointly estimate the quantiles of the univariate conditional distributions of a multivariate response, accounting for possible correlation between the outcomes. Sources of unobserved heterogeneity and serial dependency due to repeated measures are modeled through the introduction of individual-specific, time-constant random coefficients and time-varying parameters evolving over time with a Markovian structure, respectively. The inferential approach is carried out through the construction of a suitable Expectation-Maximization algorithm without parametric assumptions on the random effects distribution.
In this article, we consider a non-parametric Bayesian approach to multivariate quantile regression. The collection of related conditional distributions of a response vector Y given a univariate covariate X is modeled using a Dependent Dirichlet Process (DDP) prior. The DDP is used to introduce dependence across x. As the realizations from a Dirichlet process prior are almost surely discrete, we need to convolve it with a kernel. To model the error distribution as flexibly as possible, we use a countable mixture of multidimensional normal distributions as our kernel. For posterior computations, we use a truncated stick-breaking representation of the DDP. This approximation enables us to deal with only a finitely number of parameters. We use a Block Gibbs sampler for estimating the model parameters. We illustrate our method with simulation studies and real data applications. Finally, we provide a theoretical justification for the proposed method through posterior consistency. Our proposed procedure is new even when the response is univariate.
In this paper the method of simulated quantiles (MSQ) of Dominicy and Veredas (2013) and Dominick et al. (2013) is extended to a general multivariate framework (MMSQ) and to provide a sparse estimator of the scale matrix (sparse-MMSQ). The MSQ, like alternative likelihood-free procedures, is based on the minimisation of the distance between appropriate statistics evaluated on the true and synthetic data simulated from the postulated model. Those statistics are functions of the quantiles providing an effective way to deal with distributions that do not admit moments of any order like the $alpha$-Stable or the Tukey lambda distribution. The lack of a natural ordering represents the major challenge for the extension of the method to the multivariate framework. Here, we rely on the notion of projectional quantile recently introduced by Hallin etal. (2010) and Kong Mizera (2012). We establish consistency and asymptotic normality of the proposed estimator. The smoothly clipped absolute deviation (SCAD) $ell_1$--penalty of Fan and Li (2001) is then introduced into the MMSQ objective function in order to achieve sparse estimation of the scaling matrix which is the major responsible for the curse of dimensionality problem. We extend the asymptotic theory and we show that the sparse-MMSQ estimator enjoys the oracle properties under mild regularity conditions. The method is illustrated and its effectiveness is tested using several synthetic datasets simulated from the Elliptical Stable distribution (ESD) for which alternative methods are recognised to perform poorly. The method is then applied to build a new network-based systemic risk measurement framework. The proposed methodology to build the network relies on a new systemic risk measure and on a parametric test of statistical dominance.
This paper considers identification and estimation of ceteris paribus effects of continuous regressors in nonseparable panel models with time homogeneity. The effects of interest are derivatives of the average and quantile structural functions of the model. We find that these derivatives are identified with two time periods for stayers, i.e. for individuals with the same regressor values in two time periods. We show that the identification results carry over to models that allow location and scale time effects. We propose nonparametric series methods and a weighted bootstrap scheme to estimate and make inference on the identified effects. The bootstrap proposed allows uniform inference for function-valued parameters such as quantile effects uniformly over a region of quantile indices and/or regressor values. An empirical application to Engel curve estimation with panel data illustrates the results.
Let $X_{nr}$ be the $r$th largest of a random sample of size $n$ from a distribution $F (x) = 1 - sum_{i = 0}^infty c_i x^{-alpha - i beta}$ for $alpha > 0$ and $beta > 0$. An inversion theorem is proved and used to derive an expansion for the quantile $F^{-1} (u)$ and powers of it. From this an expansion in powers of $(n^{-1}, n^{-beta/alpha})$ is given for the multivariate moments of the extremes ${X_{n, n - s_i}, 1 leq i leq k }/n^{1/alpha}$ for fixed ${bf s} = (s_1, ..., s_k)$, where $k geq 1$. Examples include the Cauchy, Student $t$, $F$, second extreme distributions and stable laws of index $alpha < 1$.