No Arabic abstract
We develop a novel exploratory tool for non-Euclidean object data based on data depth, extending the celebrated Tukeys depth for Euclidean data. The proposed metric halfspace depth, applicable to data objects in a general metric space, assigns to data points depth values that characterize the centrality of these points with respect to the distribution and provides an interpretable center-outward ranking. Desirable theoretical properties that generalize standard depth properties postulated for Euclidean data are established for the metric halfspace depth. The depth median, defined as the deepest point, is shown to have high robustness as a location descriptor both in theory and in simulation. We propose an efficient algorithm to approximate the metric halfspace depth and illustrate its ability to adapt to the intrinsic data geometry. The metric halfspace depth was applied to an Alzheimers disease study, revealing group differences in the brain connectivity, modeled as covariance matrices, for subjects in different stages of dementia. Based on phylogenetic trees of 7 pathogenic parasites, our proposed metric halfspace depth was also used to construct a meaningful consensus estimate of the evolutionary history and to identify potential outlier trees.
Statistical analysis on object data presents many challenges. Basic summaries such as means and variances are difficult to compute. We apply ideas from topology to study object data. We present a framework for using persistence landscapes to vectorize object data and perform statistical analysis. We apply to this pipeline to some biological images that were previously shown to be challenging to study using shape theory. Surprisingly, the most persistent features are shown to be topological noise and the statistical analysis depends on the less persistent features which we refer to as the geometric signal. We also describe the first steps to a new approach to using topology for object data analysis, which applies topology to distributions on object spaces.
The vast availability of large scale, massive and big data has increased the computational cost of data analysis. One such case is the computational cost of the univariate filtering which typically involves fitting many univariate regression models and is essential for numerous variable selection algorithms to reduce the number of predictor variables. The paper manifests how to dramatically reduce that computational cost by employing the score test or the simple Pearson correlation (or the t-test for binary responses). Extensive Monte Carlo simulation studies will demonstrate their advantages and disadvantages compared to the likelihood ratio test and examples with real data will illustrate the performance of the score test and the log-likelihood ratio test under realistic scenarios. Depending on the regression model used, the score test is 30 - 60,000 times faster than the log-likelihood ratio test and produces nearly the same results. Hence this paper strongly recommends to substitute the log-likelihood ratio test with the score test when coping with large scale data, massive data, big data, or even with data whose sample size is in the order of a few tens of thousands or higher.
Massive data bring the big challenges of memory and computation for analysis. These challenges can be tackled by taking subsamples from the full data as a surrogate. For functional data, it is common to collect multiple measurements over their domains, which require even more memory and computation time when the sample size is large. The computation would be much more intensive when statistical inference is required through bootstrap samples. To the best of our knowledge, this article is the first attempt to study the subsampling method for the functional linear model. We propose an optimal subsampling method based on the functional L-optimality criterion. When the response is a discrete or categorical variable, we further extend our proposed functional L-optimality subsampling (FLoS) method to the functional generalized linear model. We establish the asymptotic properties of the estimators by the FLoS method. The finite sample performance of our proposed FLoS method is investigated by extensive simulation studies. The FLoS method is further demonstrated by analyzing two large-scale datasets: the global climate data and the kidney transplant data. The analysis results on these data show that the FLoS method is much better than the uniform subsampling approach and can well approximate the results based on the full data while dramatically reducing the computation time and memory.
Spatio-temporal data sets are rapidly growing in size. For example, environmental variables are measured with ever-higher resolution by increasing numbers of automated sensors mounted on satellites and aircraft. Using such data, which are typically noisy and incomplete, the goal is to obtain complete maps of the spatio-temporal process, together with proper uncertainty quantification. We focus here on real-time filtering inference in linear Gaussian state-space models. At each time point, the state is a spatial field evaluated on a very large spatial grid, making exact inference using the Kalman filter computationally infeasible. Instead, we propose a multi-resolution filter (MRF), a highly scalable and fully probabilistic filtering method that resolves spatial features at all scales. We prove that the MRF matrices exhibit a particular block-sparse multi-resolution structure that is preserved under filtering operations through time. We also discuss inference on time-varying parameters using an approximate Rao-Blackwellized particle filter, in which the integrated likelihood is computed using the MRF. We compare the MRF to existing approaches in a simulation study and a real satellite-data application.
A data depth measures the centrality of a point with respect to an empirical distribution. Postulates are formulated, which a depth for functional data should satisfy, and a general approach is proposed to construct multivariate data depths in Banach spaces. The new approach, mentioned as Phi-depth, is based on depth infima over a proper set Phi of R^d-valued linear functions. Several desirable properties are established for the Phi-depth and a generalized version of it. The general notions include many new depths as special cases. In particular a location-slope depth and a principal component depth are introduced.