No Arabic abstract
This paper focuses on exploring the sparsity of the inverse covariance matrix $bSigma^{-1}$, or the precision matrix. We form blocks of parameters based on each off-diagonal band of the Cholesky factor from its modified Cholesky decomposition, and penalize each block of parameters using the $L_2$-norm instead of individual elements. We develop a one-step estimator, and prove an oracle property which consists of a notion of block sign-consistency and asymptotic normality. In particular, provided the initial estimator of the Cholesky factor is good enough and the true Cholesky has finite number of non-zero off-diagonal bands, oracle property holds for the one-step estimator even if $p_n gg n$, and can even be as large as $log p_n = o(n)$, where the data $y$ has mean zero and tail probability $P(|y_j| > x) leq Kexp(-Cx^d)$, $d > 0$, and $p_n$ is the number of variables. We also prove an operator norm convergence result, showing the cost of dimensionality is just $log p_n$. The advantage of this method over banding by Bickel and Levina (2008) or nested LASSO by Levina emph{et al.} (2007) is that it allows for elimination of weaker signals that precede stronger ones in the Cholesky factor. A method for obtaining an initial estimator for the Cholesky factor is discussed, and a gradient projection algorithm is developed for calculating the one-step estimate. Simulation results are in favor of the newly proposed method and a set of real data is analyzed using the new procedure and the banding method.
We propose a Bayesian methodology for estimating spiked covariance matrices with jointly sparse structure in high dimensions. The spiked covariance matrix is reparametrized in terms of the latent factor model, where the loading matrix is equipped with a novel matrix spike-and-slab LASSO prior, which is a continuous shrinkage prior for modeling jointly sparse matrices. We establish the rate-optimal posterior contraction for the covariance matrix with respect to the operator norm as well as that for the principal subspace with respect to the projection operator norm loss. We also study the posterior contraction rate of the principal subspace with respect to the two-to-infinity norm loss, a novel loss function measuring the distance between subspaces that is able to capture element-wise eigenvector perturbations. We show that the posterior contraction rate with respect to the two-to-infinity norm loss is tighter than that with respect to the routinely used projection operator norm loss under certain low-rank and bounded coherence conditions. In addition, a point estimator for the principal subspace is proposed with the rate-optimal risk bound with respect to the projection operator norm loss. These results are based on a collection of concentration and large deviation inequalities for the matrix spike-and-slab LASSO prior. The numerical performance of the proposed methodology is assessed through synthetic examples and the analysis of a real-world face data example.
Last decade witnesses significant methodological and theoretical advances in estimating large precision matrices. In particular, there are scientific applications such as longitudinal data, meteorology and spectroscopy in which the ordering of the variables can be interpreted through a bandable structure on the Cholesky factor of the precision matrix. However, the minimax theory has still been largely unknown, as opposed to the well established minimax results over the corresponding bandable covariance matrices. In this paper, we focus on two commonly used types of parameter spaces, and develop the optimal rates of convergence under both the operator norm and the Frobenius norm. A striking phenomenon is found: two types of parameter spaces are fundamentally different under the operator norm but enjoy the same rate optimality under the Frobenius norm, which is in sharp contrast to the equivalence of corresponding two types of bandable covariance matrices under both norms. This fundamental difference is established by carefully constructing the corresponding minimax lower bounds. Two new estimation procedures are developed: for the operator norm, our optimal procedure is based on a novel local cropping estimator targeting on all principle submatrices of the precision matrix while for the Frobenius norm, our optimal procedure relies on a delicate regression-based thresholding rule. Lepskis method is considered to achieve optimal adaptation. We further establish rate optimality in the nonparanormal model. Numerical studies are carried out to confirm our theoretical findings.
We consider the estimation of large covariance and precision matrices from high-dimensional sub-Gaussian or heavier-tailed observations with slowly decaying temporal dependence. The temporal dependence is allowed to be long-range so with longer memory than those considered in the current literature. We show that several commonly used methods for independent observations can be applied to the temporally dependent data. In particular, the rates of convergence are obtained for the generalized thresholding estimation of covariance and correlation matrices, and for the constrained $ell_1$ minimization and the $ell_1$ penalized likelihood estimation of precision matrix. Properties of sparsistency and sign-consistency are also established. A gap-block cross-validation method is proposed for the tuning parameter selection, which performs well in simulations. As a motivating example, we study the brain functional connectivity using resting-state fMRI time series data with long-range temporal dependence.
We study variance estimation and associated confidence intervals for parameters characterizing genetic effects from genome-wide association studies (GWAS) misspecified mixed model analysis. Previous studies have shown that, in spite of the model misspecification, certain quantities of genetic interests are estimable, and consistent estimators of these quantities can be obtained using the restricted maximum likelihood (REML) method under a misspecified linear mixed model. However, the asymptotic variance of such a REML estimator is complicated and not ready to be implemented for practical use. In this paper, we develop practical and computationally convenient methods for estimating such asymptotic variances and constructing the associated confidence intervals. Performance of the proposed methods is evaluated empirically based on Monte-Carlo simulations and real-data application.
We consider the nonparametric estimation of an S-shaped regression function. The least squares estimator provides a very natural, tuning-free approach, but results in a non-convex optimisation problem, since the inflection point is unknown. We show that the estimator may nevertheless be regarded as a projection onto a finite union of convex cones, which allows us to propose a mixed primal-dual bases algorithm for its efficient, sequential computation. After developing a projection framework that demonstrates the consistency and robustness to misspecification of the estimator, our main theoretical results provide sharp oracle inequalities that yield worst-case and adaptive risk bounds for the estimation of the regression function, as well as a rate of convergence for the estimation of the inflection point. These results reveal not only that the estimator achieves the minimax optimal rate of convergence for both the estimation of the regression function and its inflection point (up to a logarithmic factor in the latter case), but also that it is able to achieve an almost-parametric rate when the true regression function is piecewise affine with not too many affine pieces. Simulations and a real data application to air pollution modelling also confirm the desirable finite-sample properties of the estimator, and our algorithm is implemented in the R package Sshaped.