No Arabic abstract
The gamma model is a generalized linear model for gamma-distributed outcomes. The model is widely applied in psychology, ecology or medicine. In this paper we focus on gamma models having a linear predictor without intercept. For a specific scenario sets of locally D- and A-optimal designs are to be developed. Recently, Gaffke et al. (2018) established a complete class and an essentially complete class of designs for gamma models to obtain locally D-optimal designs. However to extend this approach to gamma model without an intercept term is complicated. To solve that further techniques have to be developed in the current work. Further, by a suitable transformation between gamma models with and without intercept optimality results may be transferred from one model to the other. Additionally by means of The General Equivalence Theorem optimality can be characterized for multiple regression by a system of polynomial inequalities which can be solved analytically or by computer algebra. By this necessary and sufficient conditions on the parameter values can be obtained for the local D-optimality of particular designs. The robustness of the derived designs with respect to misspecifications of the initial parameter values is examined by means of their local D-efficiencies.
We give an overview over the usefulness of the concept of equivariance and invariance in the design of experiments for generalized linear models. In contrast to linear models here pairs of transformations have to be considered which act simultaneously on the experimental settings and on the location parameters in the linear component. Given the transformation of the experimental settings the parameter transformations are not unique and may be nonlinear to make further use of the model structure. The general concepts and results are illustrated by models with gamma distributed response. Locally optimal and maximin efficient design are obtained for the common D- and IMSE-criterion.
We consider the problem of designing experiments for the comparison of two regression curves describing the relation between a predictor and a response in two groups, where the data between and within the group may be dependent. In order to derive efficient designs we use results from stochastic analysis to identify the best linear unbiased estimator (BLUE) in a corresponding continuous time model. It is demonstrated that in general simultaneous estimation using the data from both groups yields more precise results than estimation of the parameters separately in the two groups. Using the BLUE from simultaneous estimation, we then construct an efficient linear estimator for finite sample size by minimizing the mean squared error between the optimal solution in the continuous time model and its discrete approximation with respect to the weights (of the linear estimator). Finally, the optimal design points are determined by minimizing the maximal width of a simultaneous confidence band for the difference of the two regression functions. The advantages of the new approach are illustrated by means of a simulation study, where it is shown that the use of the optimal designs yields substantially narrower confidence bands than the application of uniform designs.
We derive the optimal proposal density for Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) using Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) (or Population Monte Carlo, PMC). The criterion for optimality is that the SMC/PMC-ABC sampler maximise the effective number of samples per parameter proposal. The optimal proposal density represents the optimal trade-off between favoring high acceptance rate and reducing the variance of the importance weights of accepted samples. We discuss two convenient approximations of this proposal and show that the optimal proposal density gives a significant boost in the expected sampling efficiency compared to standard kernels that are in common use in the ABC literature, especially as the number of parameters increases.
In the setting of high-dimensional linear models with Gaussian noise, we investigate the possibility of confidence statements connected to model selection. Although there exist numerous procedures for adaptive point estimation, the construction of adaptive confidence regions is severely limited (cf. Li, 1989). The present paper sheds new light on this gap. We develop exact and adaptive confidence sets for the best approximating model in terms of risk. One of our constructions is based on a multiscale procedure and a particular coupling argument. Utilizing exponential inequalities for noncentral chi-squared distributions, we show that the risk and quadratic loss of all models within our confidence region are uniformly bounded by the minimal risk times a factor close to one.
We propose a Bayesian approach, called the posterior spectral embedding, for estimating the latent positions in random dot product graphs, and prove its optimality. Unlike the classical spectral-based adjacency/Laplacian spectral embedding, the posterior spectral embedding is a fully-likelihood based graph estimation method taking advantage of the Bernoulli likelihood information of the observed adjacency matrix. We develop a minimax-lower bound for estimating the latent positions, and show that the posterior spectral embedding achieves this lower bound since it both results in a minimax-optimal posterior contraction rate, and yields a point estimator achieving the minimax risk asymptotically. The convergence results are subsequently applied to clustering in stochastic block models, the result of which strengthens an existing result concerning the number of mis-clustered vertices. We also study a spectral-based Gaussian spectral embedding as a natural Bayesian analogy of the adjacency spectral embedding, but the resulting posterior contraction rate is sub-optimal with an extra logarithmic factor. The practical performance of the proposed methodology is illustrated through extensive synthetic examples and the analysis of a Wikipedia graph data.