No Arabic abstract
Neural networks are usually not the tool of choice for nonparametric high-dimensional problems where the number of input features is much larger than the number of observations. Though neural networks can approximate complex multivariate functions, they generally require a large number of training observations to obtain reasonable fits, unless one can learn the appropriate network structure. In this manuscript, we show that neural networks can be applied successfully to high-dimensional settings if the true function falls in a low dimensional subspace, and proper regularization is used. We propose fitting a neural network with a sparse group lasso penalty on the first-layer input weights. This results in a neural net that only uses a small subset of the original features. In addition, we characterize the statistical convergence of the penalized empirical risk minimizer to the optimal neural network: we show that the excess risk of this penalized estimator only grows with the logarithm of the number of input features; and we show that the weights of irrelevant features converge to zero. Via simulation studies and data analyses, we show that these sparse-input neural networks outperform existing nonparametric high-dimensional estimation methods when the data has complex higher-order interactions.
Statistical inference in high dimensional settings has recently attracted enormous attention within the literature. However, most published work focuses on the parametric linear regression problem. This paper considers an important extension of this problem: statistical inference for high dimensional sparse nonparametric additive models. To be more precise, this paper develops a methodology for constructing a probability density function on the set of all candidate models. This methodology can also be applied to construct confidence intervals for various quantities of interest (such as noise variance) and confidence bands for the additive functions. This methodology is derived using a generalized fiducial inference framework. It is shown that results produced by the proposed methodology enjoy correct asymptotic frequentist properties. Empirical results obtained from numerical experimentation verify this theoretical claim. Lastly, the methodology is applied to a gene expression data set and discovers new findings for which most existing methods based on parametric linear modeling failed to observe.
High-dimensional, low sample-size (HDLSS) data problems have been a topic of immense importance for the last couple of decades. There is a vast literature that proposed a wide variety of approaches to deal with this situation, among which variable selection was a compelling idea. On the other hand, a deep neural network has been used to model complicated relationships and interactions among responses and features, which is hard to capture using a linear or an additive model. In this paper, we discuss the current status of variable selection techniques with the neural network models. We show that the stage-wise algorithm with neural network suffers from disadvantages such as the variables entering into the model later may not be consistent. We then propose an ensemble method to achieve better variable selection and prove that it has probability tending to zero that a false variable is selected. Then, we discuss additional regularization to deal with over-fitting and make better regression and classification. We study various statistical properties of our proposed method. Extensive simulations and real data examples are provided to support the theory and methodology.
With the availability of high dimensional genetic biomarkers, it is of interest to identify heterogeneous effects of these predictors on patients survival, along with proper statistical inference. Censored quantile regression has emerged as a powerful tool for detecting heterogeneous effects of covariates on survival outcomes. To our knowledge, there is little work available to draw inference on the effects of high dimensional predictors for censored quantile regression. This paper proposes a novel procedure to draw inference on all predictors within the framework of global censored quantile regression, which investigates covariate-response associations over an interval of quantile levels, instead of a few discrete values. The proposed estimator combines a sequence of low dimensional model estimates that are based on multi-sample splittings and variable selection. We show that, under some regularity conditions, the estimator is consistent and asymptotically follows a Gaussian process indexed by the quantile level. Simulation studies indicate that our procedure can properly quantify the uncertainty of the estimates in high dimensional settings. We apply our method to analyze the heterogeneous effects of SNPs residing in lung cancer pathways on patients survival, using the Boston Lung Cancer Survival Cohort, a cancer epidemiology study on the molecular mechanism of lung cancer.
We study a mean-field spike and slab variational Bayes (VB) approximation to Bayesian model selection priors in sparse high-dimensional linear regression. Under compatibility conditions on the design matrix, oracle inequalities are derived for the mean-field VB approximation, implying that it converges to the sparse truth at the optimal rate and gives optimal prediction of the response vector. The empirical performance of our algorithm is studied, showing that it works comparably well as other state-of-the-art Bayesian variable selection methods. We also numerically demonstrate that the widely used coordinate-ascent variational inference (CAVI) algorithm can be highly sensitive to the parameter updating order, leading to potentially poor performance. To mitigate this, we propose a novel prioritized updating scheme that uses a data-driven updating order and performs better in simulations. The variational algorithm is implemented in the R package sparsevb.