No Arabic abstract
The lasso and related sparsity inducing algorithms have been the target of substantial theoretical and applied research. Correspondingly, many results are known about their behavior for a fixed or optimally chosen tuning parameter specified up to unknown constants. In practice, however, this oracle tuning parameter is inaccessible so one must use the data to select one. Common statistical practice is to use a variant of cross-validation for this task. However, little is known about the theoretical properties of the resulting predictions with such data-dependent methods. We consider the high-dimensional setting with random design wherein the number of predictors $p$ grows with the number of observations $n$. Under typical assumptions on the data generating process, similar to those in the literature, we recover oracle rates up to a log factor when choosing the tuning parameter with cross-validation. Under weaker conditions, when the true model is not necessarily linear, we show that the lasso remains risk consistent relative to its linear oracle. We also generalize these results to the group lasso and square-root lasso and investigate the predictive and model selection performance of cross-validation via simulation.
The lasso procedure is ubiquitous in the statistical and signal processing literature, and as such, is the target of substantial theoretical and applied research. While much of this research focuses on the desirable properties that lasso possesses---predictive risk consistency, sign consistency, correct model selection---all of it has assumes that the tuning parameter is chosen in an oracle fashion. Yet, this is impossible in practice. Instead, data analysts must use the data twice, once to choose the tuning parameter and again to estimate the model. But only heuristics have ever justified such a procedure. To this end, we give the first definitive answer about the risk consistency of lasso when the smoothing parameter is chosen via cross-validation. We show that under some restrictions on the design matrix, the lasso estimator is still risk consistent with an empirically chosen tuning parameter.
It has long been known that for the comparison of pairwise nested models, a decision based on the Bayes factor produces a consistent model selector (in the frequentist sense). Here we go beyond the usual consistency for nested pairwise models, and show that for a wide class of prior distributions, including intrinsic priors, the corresponding Bayesian procedure for variable selection in normal regression is consistent in the entire class of normal linear models. We find that the asymptotics of the Bayes factors for intrinsic priors are equivalent to those of the Schwarz (BIC) criterion. Also, recall that the Jeffreys--Lindley paradox refers to the well-known fact that a point null hypothesis on the normal mean parameter is always accepted when the variance of the conjugate prior goes to infinity. This implies that some limiting forms of proper prior distributions are not necessarily suitable for testing problems. Intrinsic priors are limits of proper prior distributions, and for finite sample sizes they have been proved to behave extremely well for variable selection in regression; a consequence of our results is that for intrinsic priors Lindleys paradox does not arise.
When data is partially missing at random, imputation and importance weighting are often used to estimate moments of the unobserved population. In this paper, we study 1-nearest neighbor (1NN) importance weighting, which estimates moments by replacing missing data with the complete data that is the nearest neighbor in the non-missing covariate space. We define an empirical measure, the 1NN measure, and show that it is weakly consistent for the measure of the missing data. The main idea behind this result is that the 1NN measure is performing inverse probability weighting in the limit. We study applications to missing data and mitigating the impact of covariate shift in prediction tasks.
Applied statisticians use sequential regression procedures to produce a ranking of explanatory variables and, in settings of low correlations between variables and strong true effect sizes, expect that variables at the very top of this ranking are truly relevant to the response. In a regime of certain sparsity levels, however, three examples of sequential procedures--forward stepwise, the lasso, and least angle regression--are shown to include the first spurious variable unexpectedly early. We derive a rigorous, sharp prediction of the rank of the first spurious variable for these three procedures, demonstrating that the first spurious variable occurs earlier and earlier as the regression coefficients become denser. This counterintuitive phenomenon persists for statistically independent Gaussian random designs and an arbitrarily large magnitude of the true effects. We gain a better understanding of the phenomenon by identifying the underlying cause and then leverage the insights to introduce a simple visualization tool termed the double-ranking diagram to improve on sequential methods. As a byproduct of these findings, we obtain the first provable result certifying the exact equivalence between the lasso and least angle regression in the early stages of solution paths beyond orthogonal designs. This equivalence can seamlessly carry over many important model selection results concerning the lasso to least angle regression.
We study uniform consistency in nonparametric mixture models as well as closely related mixture of regression (also known as mixed regression) models, where the regression functions are allowed to be nonparametric and the error distributions are assumed to be convolutions of a Gaussian density. We construct uniformly consistent estimators under general conditions while simultaneously highlighting several pain points in extending existing pointwise consistency results to uniform results. The resulting analysis turns out to be nontrivial, and several novel technical tools are developed along the way. In the case of mixed regression, we prove $L^1$ convergence of the regression functions while allowing for the component regression functions to intersect arbitrarily often, which presents additional technical challenges. We also consider generalizations to general (i.e. non-convolutional) nonparametric mixtures.