No Arabic abstract
Non-parametric maximum likelihood estimation encompasses a group of classic methods to estimate distribution-associated functions from potentially censored and truncated data, with extensive applications in survival analysis. These methods, including the Kaplan-Meier estimator and Turnbulls method, often result in overfitting, especially when the sample size is small. We propose an improvement to these methods by applying kernel smoothing to their raw estimates, based on a BIC-type loss function that balances the trade-off between optimizing model fit and controlling model complexity. In the context of a longitudinal study with repeated observations, we detail our proposed smoothing procedure and optimization algorithm. With extensive simulation studies over multiple realistic scenarios, we demonstrate that our smoothing-based procedure provides better overall accuracy in both survival function estimation and individual-level time-to-event prediction by reducing overfitting. Our smoothing procedure decreases the discrepancy between the estimated and true simulated survival function using interval-censored data by up to 49% compared to the raw un-smoothed estimate, with similar improvements of up to 41% and 23% in within-sample and out-of-sample prediction, respectively. Finally, we apply our method to real data on censored breast cancer diagnosis, which similarly shows improvement when compared to empirical survival estimates from uncensored data. We provide an R package, SISE, for implementing our penalized likelihood method.
We consider the problem of estimating parameters of stochastic differential equations (SDEs) with discrete-time observations that are either completely or partially observed. The transition density between two observations is generally unknown. We propose an importance sampling approach with an auxiliary parameter when the transition density is unknown. We embed the auxiliary importance sampler in a penalized maximum likelihood framework which produces more accurate and computationally efficient parameter estimates. Simulation studies in three different models illustrate promising improvements of the new penalized simulated maximum likelihood method. The new procedure is designed for the challenging case when some state variables are unobserved and moreover, observed states are sparse over time, which commonly arises in ecological studies. We apply this new approach to two epidemics of chronic wasting disease in mule deer.
This work was motivated by observational studies in pregnancy with spontaneous abortion (SAB) as outcome. Clearly some women experience the SAB event but the rest do not. In addition, the data are left truncated due to the way pregnant women are recruited into these studies. For those women who do experience SAB, their exact event times are sometimes unknown. Finally, a small percentage of the women are lost to follow-up during their pregnancy. All these give rise to data that are left truncated, partly interval and right-censored, and with a clearly defined cured portion. We consider the non-mixture Cox regression cure rate model and adopt the semiparametric spline-based sieve maximum likelihood approach to analyze such data. Using modern empirical process theory we show that both the parametric and the nonparametric parts of the sieve estimator are consistent, and we establish the asymptotic normality for both parts. Simulation studies are conducted to establish the finite sample performance. Finally, we apply our method to a database of observational studies on spontaneous abortion.
A maximum likelihood methodology for a general class of models is presented, using an approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) approach. The typical target of ABC methods are models with intractable likelihoods, and we combine an ABC-MCMC sampler with so-called data cloning for maximum likelihood estimation. Accuracy of ABC methods relies on the use of a small threshold value for comparing simulations from the model and observed data. The proposed methodology shows how to use large threshold values, while the number of data-clones is increased to ease convergence towards an approximate maximum likelihood estimate. We show how to exploit the methodology to reduce the number of iterations of a standard ABC-MCMC algorithm and therefore reduce the computational effort, while obtaining reasonable point estimates. Simulation studies show the good performance of our approach on models with intractable likelihoods such as g-and-k distributions, stochastic differential equations and state-space models.
We derive Laplace-approximated maximum likelihood estimators (GLAMLEs) of parameters in our Graph Generalized Linear Latent Variable Models. Then, we study the statistical properties of GLAMLEs when the number of nodes $n_V$ and the observed times of a graph denoted by $K$ diverge to infinity. Finally, we display the estimation results in a Monte Carlo simulation considering different numbers of latent variables. Besides, we make a comparison between Laplace and variational approximations for inference of our model.
The von Mises-Fisher distribution is one of the most widely used probability distributions to describe directional data. Finite mixtures of von Mises-Fisher distributions have found numerous applications. However, the likelihood function for the finite mixture of von Mises-Fisher distributions is unbounded and consequently the maximum likelihood estimation is not well defined. To address the problem of likelihood degeneracy, we consider a penalized maximum likelihood approach whereby a penalty function is incorporated. We prove strong consistency of the resulting estimator. An Expectation-Maximization algorithm for the penalized likelihood function is developed and simulation studies are performed to examine its performance.