No Arabic abstract
Motivated by recent data analyses in biomedical imaging studies, we consider a class of image-on-scalar regression models for imaging responses and scalar predictors. We propose using flexible multivariate splines over triangulations to handle the irregular domain of the objects of interest on the images, as well as other characteristics of images. The proposed estimators of the coefficient functions are proved to be root-n consistent and asymptotically normal under some regularity conditions. We also provide a consistent and computationally efficient estimator of the covariance function. Asymptotic pointwise confidence intervals and data-driven simultaneous confidence corridors for the coefficient functions are constructed. Our method can simultaneously estimate and make inferences on the coefficient functions while incorporating spatial heterogeneity and spatial correlation. A highly efficient and scalable estimation algorithm is developed. Monte Carlo simulation studies are conducted to examine the finite-sample performance of the proposed method, which is then applied to the spatially normalized positron emission tomography data of the Alzheimers Disease Neuroimaging Initiative.
We develop a fully Bayesian nonparametric regression model based on a Levy process prior named MLABS (Multivariate Levy Adaptive B-Spline regression) model, a multivariate version of the LARK (Levy Adaptive Regression Kernels) models, for estimating unknown functions with either varying degrees of smoothness or high interaction orders. Levy process priors have advantages of encouraging sparsity in the expansions and providing automatic selection over the number of basis functions. The unknown regression function is expressed as a weighted sum of tensor product of B-spline basis functions as the elements of an overcomplete system, which can deal with multi-dimensional data. The B-spline basis can express systematically functions with varying degrees of smoothness. By changing a set of degrees of the tensor product basis function, MLABS can adapt the smoothness of target functions due to the nice properties of B-spline bases. The local support of the B-spline basis enables the MLABS to make more delicate predictions than other existing methods in the two-dimensional surface data. Experiments on various simulated and real-world datasets illustrate that the MLABS model has comparable performance on regression and classification problems. We also show that the MLABS model has more stable and accurate predictive abilities than state-of-the-art nonparametric regression models in relatively low-dimensional data.
There are many scenarios such as the electronic health records where the outcome is much more difficult to collect than the covariates. In this paper, we consider the linear regression problem with such a data structure under the high dimensionality. Our goal is to investigate when and how the unlabeled data can be exploited to improve the estimation and inference of the regression parameters in linear models, especially in light of the fact that such linear models may be misspecified in data analysis. In particular, we address the following two important questions. (1) Can we use the labeled data as well as the unlabeled data to construct a semi-supervised estimator such that its convergence rate is faster than the supervised estimators? (2) Can we construct confidence intervals or hypothesis tests that are guaranteed to be more efficient or powerful than the supervised estimators? To address the first question, we establish the minimax lower bound for parameter estimation in the semi-supervised setting. We show that the upper bound from the supervised estimators that only use the labeled data cannot attain this lower bound. We close this gap by proposing a new semi-supervised estimator which attains the lower bound. To address the second question, based on our proposed semi-supervised estimator, we propose two additional estimators for semi-supervised inference, the efficient estimator and the safe estimator. The former is fully efficient if the unknown conditional mean function is estimated consistently, but may not be more efficient than the supervised approach otherwise. The latter usually does not aim to provide fully efficient inference, but is guaranteed to be no worse than the supervised approach, no matter whether the linear model is correctly specified or the conditional mean function is consistently estimated.
This paper studies high-dimensional regression with two-way structured data. To estimate the high-dimensional coefficient vector, we propose the generalized matrix decomposition regression (GMDR) to efficiently leverage any auxiliary information on row and column structures. The GMDR extends the principal component regression (PCR) to two-way structured data, but unlike PCR, the GMDR selects the components that are most predictive of the outcome, leading to more accurate prediction. For inference on regression coefficients of individual variables, we propose the generalized matrix decomposition inference (GMDI), a general high-dimensional inferential framework for a large family of estimators that include the proposed GMDR estimator. GMDI provides more flexibility for modeling relevant auxiliary row and column structures. As a result, GMDI does not require the true regression coefficients to be sparse; it also allows dependent and heteroscedastic observations. We study the theoretical properties of GMDI in terms of both the type-I error rate and power and demonstrate the effectiveness of GMDR and GMDI on simulation studies and an application to human microbiome data.
It has become increasingly common to collect high-dimensional binary data; for example, with the emergence of new sampling techniques in ecology. In smaller dimensions, multivariate probit (MVP) models are routinely used for inferences. However, algorithms for fitting such models face issues in scaling up to high dimensions due to the intractability of the likelihood, involving an integral over a multivariate normal distribution having no analytic form. Although a variety of algorithms have been proposed to approximate this intractable integral, these approaches are difficult to implement and/or inaccurate in high dimensions. We propose a two-stage Bayesian approach for inference on model parameters while taking care of the uncertainty propagation between the stages. We use the special structure of latent Gaussian models to reduce the highly expensive computation involved in joint parameter estimation to focus inference on marginal distributions of model parameters. This essentially makes the method embarrassingly parallel for both stages. We illustrate performance in simulations and applications to joint species distribution modeling in ecology.
This paper develops a novel spatial quantile function-on-scalar regression model, which studies the conditional spatial distribution of a high-dimensional functional response given scalar predictors. With the strength of both quantile regression and copula modeling, we are able to explicitly characterize the conditional distribution of the functional or image response on the whole spatial domain. Our method provides a comprehensive understanding of the effect of scalar covariates on functional responses across different quantile levels and also gives a practical way to generate new images for given covariate values. Theoretically, we establish the minimax rates of convergence for estimating coefficient functions under both fixed and random designs. We further develop an efficient primal-dual algorithm to handle high-dimensional image data. Simulations and real data analysis are conducted to examine the finite-sample performance.