No Arabic abstract
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.
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.
We derive Laplace-approximated maximum likelihood estimators (GLAMLEs) of parameters in our Graph Generalized Linear Latent Variable Models. Then, we study the statistical properties of GLAMLEs when the number of nodes $n_V$ and the observed times of a graph denoted by $K$ diverge to infinity. Finally, we display the estimation results in a Monte Carlo simulation considering different numbers of latent variables. Besides, we make a comparison between Laplace and variational approximations for inference of our model.
Nonparametric maximum likelihood (NPML) for mixture models is a technique for estimating mixing distributions that has a long and rich history in statistics going back to the 1950s, and is closely related to empirical Bayes methods. Historically, NPML-based methods have been considered to be relatively impractical because of computational and theoretical obstacles. However, recent work focusing on approximate NPML methods suggests that these methods may have great promise for a variety of modern applications. Building on this recent work, a class of flexible, scalable, and easy to implement approximate NPML methods is studied for problems with multivariate mixing distributions. Concrete guidance on implementing these methods is provided, with theoretical and empirical support; topics covered include identifying the support set of the mixing distribution, and comparing algorithms (across a variety of metrics) for solving the simple convex optimization problem at the core of the approximate NPML problem. Additionally, three diverse real data applications are studied to illustrate the methods performance: (i) A baseball data analysis (a classical example for empirical Bayes methods), (ii) high-dimensional microarray classification, and (iii) online prediction of blood-glucose density for diabetes patients. Among other things, the empirical results demonstrate the relative effectiveness of using multivariate (as opposed to univariate) mixing distributions for NPML-based approaches.
Maximum likelihood constraint inference is a powerful technique for identifying unmodeled constraints that affect the behavior of a demonstrator acting under a known objective function. However, it was originally formulated only for discrete state-action spaces. Continuous dynamics are more useful for modeling many real-world systems of interest, including the movements of humans and robots. We present a method to generate a tabular state-action space that approximates continuous dynamics and can be used for constraint inference on demonstrations that obey the true system dynamics. We then demonstrate accurate constraint inference on nonlinear pendulum systems with 2- and 4-dimensional state spaces, and show that performance is robust to a range of hyperparameters. The demonstrations are not required to be fully optimal with respect to the objective, and the most likely constraints can be identified even when demonstrations cover only a small portion of the state space. For these reasons, the proposed approach may be especially useful for inferring constraints on human demonstrators, which has important applications in human-robot interaction and biomechanical medicine.
The random coefficients model $Y_i={beta_0}_i+{beta_1}_i {X_1}_i+{beta_2}_i {X_2}_i+ldots+{beta_d}_i {X_d}_i$, with $mathbf{X}_i$, $Y_i$, $mathbf{beta}_i$ i.i.d, and $mathbf{beta}_i$ independent of $X_i$ is often used to capture unobserved heterogeneity in a population. We propose a quasi-maximum likelihood method to estimate the joint density distribution of the random coefficient model. This method implicitly involves the inversion of the Radon transformation in order to reconstruct the joint distribution, and hence is an inverse problem. Nonparametric estimation for the joint density of $mathbf{beta}_i=({beta_0}_i,ldots, {beta_d}_i)$ based on kernel methods or Fourier inversion have been proposed in recent years. Most of these methods assume a heavy tailed design density $f_mathbf{X}$. To add stability to the solution, we apply regularization methods. We analyze the convergence of the method without assuming heavy tails for $f_mathbf{X}$ and illustrate performance by applying the method on simulated and real data. To add stability to the solution, we apply a Tikhonov-type regularization method.