No Arabic abstract
The goal of this paper is to show that a single robust estimator of the mean of a multivariate Gaussian distribution can enjoy five desirable properties. First, it is computationally tractable in the sense that it can be computed in a time which is at most polynomial in dimension, sample size and the logarithm of the inverse of the contamination rate. Second, it is equivariant by translations, uniform scaling and orthogonal transformations. Third, it has a high breakdown point equal to $0.5$, and a nearly-minimax-rate-breakdown point approximately equal to $0.28$. Fourth, it is minimax rate optimal, up to a logarithmic factor, when data consists of independent observations corrupted by adversarially chosen outliers. Fifth, it is asymptotically efficient when the rate of contamination tends to zero. The estimator is obtained by an iterative reweighting approach. Each sample point is assigned a weight that is iteratively updated by solving a convex optimization problem. We also establish a dimension-free non-asymptotic risk bound for the expected error of the proposed estimator. It is the first result of this kind in the literature and involves only the effective rank of the covariance matrix. Finally, we show that the obtained results can be extended to sub-Gaussian distributions, as well as to the cases of unknown rate of contamination or unknown covariance matrix.
We discuss the possibilities and limitations of estimating the mean of a real-valued random variable from independent and identically distributed observations from a non-asymptotic point of view. In particular, we define estimators with a sub-Gaussian behavior even for certain heavy-tailed distributions. We also prove various impossibility results for mean estimators.
This paper deals with a new Bayesian approach to the standard one-sample $z$- and $t$- tests. More specifically, let $x_1,ldots,x_n$ be an independent random sample from a normal distribution with mean $mu$ and variance $sigma^2$. The goal is to test the null hypothesis $mathcal{H}_0: mu=mu_1$ against all possible alternatives. The approach is based on using the well-known formula of the Kullbak-Leibler divergence between two normal distributions (sampling and hypothesized distributions selected in an appropriate way). The change of the distance from a priori to a posteriori is compared through the relative belief ratio (a measure of evidence). Eliciting the prior, checking for prior-data conflict and bias are also considered. Many theoretical properties of the procedure have been developed. Besides its simplicity, and unlike the classical approach, the new approach possesses attractive and distinctive features such as giving evidence in favor of the null hypothesis. It also avoids several undesirable paradoxes, such as Lindleys paradox that may be encountered by some existing Bayesian methods. The use of the approach has been illustrated through several examples.
Hotellings T-squared test is a classical tool to test if the normal mean of a multivariate normal distribution is a specified one or the means of two multivariate normal means are equal. When the population dimension is higher than the sample size, the test is no longer applicable. Under this situation, in this paper we revisit the tests proposed by Srivastava and Du (2008), who revise the Hotellings statistics by replacing Wishart matrices with their diagonal matrices. They show the revised statistics are asymptotically normal. We use the random matrix theory to examine their statistics again and find that their discovery is just part of the big picture. In fact, we prove that their statistics, decided by the Euclidean norm of the population correlation matrix, can go to normal, mixing chi-squared distributions and a convolution of both. Examples are provided to show the phase transition phenomenon between the normal and mixing chi-squared distributions. The second contribution of ours is a rigorous derivation of an asymptotic ratio-unbiased-estimator of the squared Euclidean norm of the correlation matrix.
In this paper, we consider an inference problem for the first order autoregressive process driven by a long memory stationary Gaussian process. Suppose that the covariance function of the noise can be expressed as $abs{k}^{2H-2}$ times a function slowly varying at infinity. The fractional Gaussian noise and the fractional ARIMA model and some others Gaussian noise are special examples that satisfy this assumption. We propose a second moment estimator and prove the strong consistency and give the asymptotic distribution. Moreover, when the limit distribution is Gaussian, we give the upper Berry-Esseen bound by means of Fourth moment theorem.
We study parameter identifiability of directed Gaussian graphical models with one latent variable. In the scenario we consider, the latent variable is a confounder that forms a source node of the graph and is a parent to all other nodes, which correspond to the observed variables. We give a graphical condition that is sufficient for the Jacobian matrix of the parametrization map to be full rank, which entails that the parametrization is generically finite-to-one, a fact that is sometimes also referred to as local identifiability. We also derive a graphical condition that is necessary for such identifiability. Finally, we give a condition under which generic parameter identifiability can be determined from identifiability of a model associated with a subgraph. The power of these criteria is assessed via an exhaustive algebraic computational study on models with 4, 5, and 6 observable variables.