No Arabic abstract
The likelihood ratio test is widely used in exploratory factor analysis to assess the model fit and determine the number of latent factors. Despite its popularity and clear statistical rationale, researchers have found that when the dimension of the response data is large compared to the sample size, the classical chi-square approximation of the likelihood ratio test statistic often fails. Theoretically, it has been an open problem when such a phenomenon happens as the dimension of data increases; practically, the effect of high dimensionality is less examined in exploratory factor analysis, and there lacks a clear statistical guideline on the validity of the conventional chi-square approximation. To address this problem, we investigate the failure of the chi-square approximation of the likelihood ratio test in high-dimensional exploratory factor analysis, and derive the necessary and sufficient condition to ensure the validity of the chi-square approximation. The results yield simple quantitative guidelines to check in practice and would also provide useful statistical insights into the practice of exploratory factor analysis.
Multivariate linear regressions are widely used statistical tools in many applications to model the associations between multiple related responses and a set of predictors. To infer such associations, it is often of interest to test the structure of the regression coefficients matrix, and the likelihood ratio test (LRT) is one of the most popular approaches in practice. Despite its popularity, it is known that the classical $chi^2$ approximations for LRTs often fail in high-dimensional settings, where the dimensions of responses and predictors $(m,p)$ are allowed to grow with the sample size $n$. Though various corrected LRTs and other test statistics have been proposed in the literature, the fundamental question of when the classic LRT starts to fail is less studied, an answer to which would provide insights for practitioners, especially when analyzing data with $m/n$ and $p/n$ small but not negligible. Moreover, the power performance of the LRT in high-dimensional data analysis remains underexplored. To address these issues, the first part of this work gives the asymptotic boundary where the classical LRT fails and develops the corrected limiting distribution of the LRT for a general asymptotic regime. The second part of this work further studies the test power of the LRT in the high-dimensional setting. The result not only advances the current understanding of asymptotic behavior of the LRT under alternative hypothesis, but also motivates the development of a power-enhanced LRT. The third part of this work considers the setting with $p>n$, where the LRT is not well-defined. We propose a two-step testing procedure by first performing dimension reduction and then applying the proposed LRT. Theoretical properties are developed to ensure the validity of the proposed method. Numerical studies are also presented to demonstrate its good performance.
Logistic regression is used thousands of times a day to fit data, predict future outcomes, and assess the statistical significance of explanatory variables. When used for the purpose of statistical inference, logistic models produce p-values for the regression coefficients by using an approximation to the distribution of the likelihood-ratio test. Indeed, Wilks theorem asserts that whenever we have a fixed number $p$ of variables, twice the log-likelihood ratio (LLR) $2Lambda$ is distributed as a $chi^2_k$ variable in the limit of large sample sizes $n$; here, $k$ is the number of variables being tested. In this paper, we prove that when $p$ is not negligible compared to $n$, Wilks theorem does not hold and that the chi-square approximation is grossly incorrect; in fact, this approximation produces p-values that are far too small (under the null hypothesis). Assume that $n$ and $p$ grow large in such a way that $p/nrightarrowkappa$ for some constant $kappa < 1/2$. We prove that for a class of logistic models, the LLR converges to a rescaled chi-square, namely, $2Lambda~stackrel{mathrm{d}}{rightarrow}~alpha(kappa)chi_k^2$, where the scaling factor $alpha(kappa)$ is greater than one as soon as the dimensionality ratio $kappa$ is positive. Hence, the LLR is larger than classically assumed. For instance, when $kappa=0.3$, $alpha(kappa)approx1.5$. In general, we show how to compute the scaling factor by solving a nonlinear system of two equations with two unknowns. Our mathematical arguments are involved and use techniques from approximate message passing theory, non-asymptotic random matrix theory and convex geometry. We also complement our mathematical study by showing that the new limiting distribution is accurate for finite sample sizes. Finally, all the results from this paper extend to some other regression models such as the probit regression model.
This paper proposes a new statistic to test independence between two high dimensional random vectors ${mathbf{X}}:p_1times1$ and ${mathbf{Y}}:p_2times1$. The proposed statistic is based on the sum of regularized sample canonical correlation coefficients of ${mathbf{X}}$ and ${mathbf{Y}}$. The asymptotic distribution of the statistic under the null hypothesis is established as a corollary of general central limit theorems (CLT) for the linear statistics of classical and regularized sample canonical correlation coefficients when $p_1$ and $p_2$ are both comparable to the sample size $n$. As applications of the developed independence test, various types of dependent structures, such as factor models, ARCH models and a general uncorrelated but dependent case, etc., are investigated by simulations. As an empirical application, cross-sectional dependence of daily stock returns of companies between different sections in the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is detected by the proposed test.
This paper considers the maximum generalized empirical likelihood (GEL) estimation and inference on parameters identified by high dimensional moment restrictions with weakly dependent data when the dimensions of the moment restrictions and the parameters diverge along with the sample size. The consistency with rates and the asymptotic normality of the GEL estimator are obtained by properly restricting the growth rates of the dimensions of the parameters and the moment restrictions, as well as the degree of data dependence. It is shown that even in the high dimensional time series setting, the GEL ratio can still behave like a chi-square random variable asymptotically. A consistent test for the over-identification is proposed. A penalized GEL method is also provided for estimation under sparsity setting.
Marginal maximum likelihood (MML) estimation is the preferred approach to fitting item response theory models in psychometrics due to the MML estimators consistency, normality, and efficiency as the sample size tends to infinity. However, state-of-the-art MML estimation procedures such as the Metropolis-Hastings Robbins-Monro (MH-RM) algorithm as well as approximate MML estimation procedures such as variational inference (VI) are computationally time-consuming when the sample size and the number of latent factors are very large. In this work, we investigate a deep learning-based VI algorithm for exploratory item factor analysis (IFA) that is computationally fast even in large data sets with many latent factors. The proposed approach applies a deep artificial neural network model called an importance-weighted autoencoder (IWAE) for exploratory IFA. The IWAE approximates the MML estimator using an importance sampling technique wherein increasing the number of importance-weighted (IW) samples drawn during fitting improves the approximation, typically at the cost of decreased computational efficiency. We provide a real data application that recovers results aligning with psychological theory across random starts. Via simulation studies, we show that the IWAE yields more accurate estimates as either the sample size or the number of IW samples increases (although factor correlation and intercepts estimates exhibit some bias) and obtains similar results to MH-RM in less time. Our simulations also suggest that the proposed approach performs similarly to and is potentially faster than constrained joint maximum likelihood estimation, a fast procedure that is consistent when the sample size and the number of items simultaneously tend to infinity.