No Arabic abstract
High-dimensional predictive models, those with more measurements than observations, require regularization to be well defined, perform well empirically, and possess theoretical guarantees. The amount of regularization, often determined by tuning parameters, is integral to achieving good performance. One can choose the tuning parameter in a variety of ways, such as through resampling methods or generalized information criteria. However, the theory supporting many regularized procedures relies on an estimate for the variance parameter, which is complicated in high dimensions. We develop a suite of information criteria for choosing the tuning parameter in lasso regression by leveraging the literature on high-dimensional variance estimation. We derive intuition showing that existing information-theoretic approaches work poorly in this setting. We compare our risk estimators to existing methods with an extensive simulation and derive some theoretical justification. We find that our new estimators perform well across a wide range of simulation conditions and evaluation criteria.
Penalized (or regularized) regression, as represented by Lasso and its variants, has become a standard technique for analyzing high-dimensional data when the number of variables substantially exceeds the sample size. The performance of penalized regression relies crucially on the choice of the tuning parameter, which determines the amount of regularization and hence the sparsity level of the fitted model. The optimal choice of tuning parameter depends on both the structure of the design matrix and the unknown random error distribution (variance, tail behavior, etc). This article reviews the current literature of tuning parameter selection for high-dimensional regression from both theoretical and practical perspectives. We discuss various strategies that choose the tuning parameter to achieve prediction accuracy or support recovery. We also review several recently proposed methods for tuning-free high-dimensional regression.
In a Gaussian graphical model, the conditional independence between two variables are characterized by the corresponding zero entries in the inverse covariance matrix. Maximum likelihood method using the smoothly clipped absolute deviation (SCAD) penalty (Fan and Li, 2001) and the adaptive LASSO penalty (Zou, 2006) have been proposed in literature. In this article, we establish the result that using Bayesian information criterion (BIC) to select the tuning parameter in penalized likelihood estimation with both types of penalties can lead to consistent graphical model selection. We compare the empirical performance of BIC with cross validation method and demonstrate the advantageous performance of BIC criterion for tuning parameter selection through simulation studies.
Among the most popular variable selection procedures in high-dimensional regression, Lasso provides a solution path to rank the variables and determines a cut-off position on the path to select variables and estimate coefficients. In this paper, we consider variable selection from a new perspective motivated by the frequently occurred phenomenon that relevant variables are not completely distinguishable from noise variables on the solution path. We propose to characterize the positions of the first noise variable and the last relevant variable on the path. We then develop a new variable selection procedure to control over-selection of the noise variables ranking after the last relevant variable, and, at the same time, retain a high proportion of relevant variables ranking before the first noise variable. Our procedure utilizes the recently developed covariance test statistic and Q statistic in post-selection inference. In numerical examples, our method compares favorably with other existing methods in selection accuracy and the ability to interpret its results.
Applying standard statistical methods after model selection may yield inefficient estimators and hypothesis tests that fail to achieve nominal type-I error rates. The main issue is the fact that the post-selection distribution of the data differs from the original distribution. In particular, the observed data is constrained to lie in a subset of the original sample space that is determined by the selected model. This often makes the post-selection likelihood of the observed data intractable and maximum likelihood inference difficult. In this work, we get around the intractable likelihood by generating noisy unbiased estimates of the post-selection score function and using them in a stochastic ascent algorithm that yields correct post-selection maximum likelihood estimates. We apply the proposed technique to the problem of estimating linear models selected by the lasso. In an asymptotic analysis the resulting estimates are shown to be consistent for the selected parameters and to have a limiting truncated normal distribution. Confidence intervals constructed based on the asymptotic distribution obtain close to nominal coverage rates in all simulation settings considered, and the point estimates are shown to be superior to the lasso estimates when the true model is sparse.
Inferring causal relationships or related associations from observational data can be invalidated by the existence of hidden confounding. We focus on a high-dimensional linear regression setting, where the measured covariates are affected by hidden confounding and propose the {em Doubly Debiased Lasso} estimator for individual components of the regression coefficient vector. Our advocated method simultaneously corrects both the bias due to estimation of high-dimensional parameters as well as the bias caused by the hidden confounding. We establish its asymptotic normality and also prove that it is efficient in the Gauss-Markov sense. The validity of our methodology relies on a dense confounding assumption, i.e. that every confounding variable affects many covariates. The finite sample performance is illustrated with an extensive simulation study and a genomic application.