No Arabic abstract
We propose modeling raw functional data as a mixture of a smooth function and a highdimensional factor component. The conventional approach to retrieving the smooth function from the raw data is through various smoothing techniques. However, the smoothing model is not adequate to recover the smooth curve or capture the data variation in some situations. These include cases where there is a large amount of measurement error, the smoothing basis functions are incorrectly identified, or the step jumps in the functional mean levels are neglected. To address these challenges, a factor-augmented smoothing model is proposed, and an iterative numerical estimation approach is implemented in practice. Including the factor model component in the proposed method solves the aforementioned problems since a few common factors often drive the variation that cannot be captured by the smoothing model. Asymptotic theorems are also established to demonstrate the effects of including factor structures on the smoothing results. Specifically, we show that the smoothing coefficients projected on the complement space of the factor loading matrix is asymptotically normal. As a byproduct of independent interest, an estimator for the population covariance matrix of the raw data is presented based on the proposed model. Extensive simulation studies illustrate that these factor adjustments are essential in improving estimation accuracy and avoiding the curse of dimensionality. The superiority of our model is also shown in modeling Canadian weather data and Australian temperature data.
In modern contexts, some types of data are observed in high-resolution, essentially continuously in time. Such data units are best described as taking values in a space of functions. Subject units carrying the observations may have intrinsic relations among themselves, and are best described by the nodes of a large graph. It is often sensible to think that the underlying signals in these functional observations vary smoothly over the graph, in that neighboring nodes have similar underlying signals. This qualitative information allows borrowing of strength over neighboring nodes and consequently leads to more accurate inference. In this paper, we consider a model with Gaussian functional observations and adopt a Bayesian approach to smoothing over the nodes of the graph. We characterize the minimax rate of estimation in terms of the regularity of the signals and their variation across nodes quantified in terms of the graph Laplacian. We show that an appropriate prior constructed from the graph Laplacian can attain the minimax bound, while using a mixture prior, the minimax rate up to a logarithmic factor can be attained simultaneously for all possible values of functional and graphical smoothness. We also show that in the fixed smoothness setting, an optimal sized credible region has arbitrarily high frequentist coverage. A simulation experiment demonstrates that the method performs better than potential competing methods like the random forest. The method is also applied to a dataset on daily temperatures measured at several weather stations in the US state of North Carolina.
We propose a nonparametric method to explicitly model and represent the derivatives of smooth underlying trajectories for longitudinal data. This representation is based on a direct Karhunen--Lo`eve expansion of the unobserved derivatives and leads to the notion of derivative principal component analysis, which complements functional principal component analysis, one of the most popular tools of functional data analysis. The proposed derivative principal component scores can be obtained for irregularly spaced and sparsely observed longitudinal data, as typically encountered in biomedical studies, as well as for functional data which are densely measured. Novel consistency results and asymptotic convergence rates for the proposed estimates of the derivative principal component scores and other components of the model are derived under a unified scheme for sparse or dense observations and mild conditions. We compare the proposed representations for derivatives with alternative approaches in simulation settings and also in a wallaby growth curve application. It emerges that representations using the proposed derivative principal component analysis recover the underlying derivatives more accurately compared to principal component analysis-based approaches especially in settings where the functional data are represented with only a very small number of components or are densely sampled. In a second wheat spectra classification example, derivative principal component scores were found to be more predictive for the protein content of wheat than the conventional functional principal component scores.
$ell_1$-penalized quantile regression is widely used for analyzing high-dimensional data with heterogeneity. It is now recognized that the $ell_1$-penalty introduces non-negligible estimation bias, while a proper use of concave regularization may lead to estimators with refined convergence rates and oracle properties as the signal strengthens. Although folded concave penalized $M$-estimation with strongly convex loss functions have been well studied, the extant literature on quantile regression is relatively silent. The main difficulty is that the quantile loss is piecewise linear: it is non-smooth and has curvature concentrated at a single point. To overcome the lack of smoothness and strong convexity, we propose and study a convolution-type smoothed quantile regression with iteratively reweighted $ell_1$-regularization. The resulting smoothed empirical loss is twice continuously differentiable and (provably) locally strongly convex with high probability. We show that the iteratively reweighted $ell_1$-penalized smoothed quantile regression estimator, after a few iterations, achieves the optimal rate of convergence, and moreover, the oracle rate and the strong oracle property under an almost necessary and sufficient minimum signal strength condition. Extensive numerical studies corroborate our theoretical results.
This paper investigates the high-dimensional linear regression with highly correlated covariates. In this setup, the traditional sparsity assumption on the regression coefficients often fails to hold, and consequently many model selection procedures do not work. To address this challenge, we model the variations of covariates by a factor structure. Specifically, strong correlations among covariates are explained by common factors and the remaining variations are interpreted as idiosyncratic components of each covariate. This leads to a factor-adjusted regression model with both common factors and idiosyncratic components as covariates. We generalize the traditional sparsity assumption accordingly and assume that all common factors but only a small number of idiosyncratic components contribute to the response. A Bayesian procedure with a spike-and-slab prior is then proposed for parameter estimation and model selection. Simulation studies show that our Bayesian method outperforms its lasso analogue, manifests insensitivity to the overestimates of the number of common factors, pays a negligible price in the no correlation case, and scales up well with increasing sample size, dimensionality and sparsity. Numerical results on a real dataset of U.S. bond risk premia and macroeconomic indicators lend strong support to our methodology.
We study the identification and estimation of statistical functionals of multivariate data missing non-monotonically and not-at-random, taking a semiparametric approach. Specifically, we assume that the missingness mechanism satisfies what has been previously called no self-censoring or itemwise conditionally independent nonresponse, which roughly corresponds to the assumption that no partially-observed variable directly determines its own missingness status. We show that this assumption, combined with an odds ratio parameterization of the joint density, enables identification of functionals of interest, and we establish the semiparametric efficiency bound for the nonparametric model satisfying this assumption. We propose a practical augmented inverse probability weighted estimator, and in the setting with a (possibly high-dimensional) always-observed subset of covariates, our proposed estimator enjoys a certain double-robustness property. We explore the performance of our estimator with simulation experiments and on a previously-studied data set of HIV-positive mothers in Botswana.