This article develops an asymptotic theory on sample tail autocorrelations of time series data that can exhibit serial dependence in both tail and non-tail regions. Unlike the traditional autocorrelation function, the study of tail autocorrelations requires a double asymptotic scheme to capture the tail phenomena, and our results do not impose any restriction on the dependence structure in non-tail

We consider the problem of conditional independence testing: given a response Y and covariates (X, Z), we test the null hypothesis that Y ╨ X∣Z. The conditional randomization test was recently proposed as a way to use distributional information about X∣Z to exactly and non-asymptotically control Type-I error using any test statistic in any dimensionality without assuming anything about Y ∣ (X, Z).

We consider forecasting a single time series using a large number of predictors in the presence of a possible nonlinear forecast function. Assuming that the predictors affect the response through the latent factors, we propose to first conduct factor analysis and then apply sufficient dimension reduction on the estimated factors, to derive the reduced data for subsequent forecasting. Using directional

A novel control variate technique is proposed for post-processing of Markov chain Monte Carlo output, based both on Stein’s method and an approach to numerical integration due to Sard. The resulting estimators of posterior expected quantities of interest are proven to be polynomially exact in the Gaussian context, while empirical results suggest the estimators approximate a Gaussian cubature method

We propose a new unit root test for a stationary null hypothesis H0 against a unit root alternative H1. Our approach is nonparametric as H0 only assumes that the process concerned is I(0) without specifying any parametric forms. The new test is based on the fact that the sample autocovariance function converges to the finite population autocovariance function for an I(0) process while it diverges to

AbstractThe paper shows that matching without replacement on propensity scores produces estimators that generally are inconsistent for the average treatment effect of the treated. To achieve consistency, practitioners must either assume that no units exist with propensity scores greater than one-half or assume that there is no confounding among such units. The result is not driven by the use of propensity

Accept-reject based Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms have traditionally utilized acceptance probabilities that can be explicitly written as a function of the ratio of the target density at the two contested points. This feature is rendered almost useless in Bayesian posteriors with unknown functional forms. We introduce a new family of Markov chain Monte Carlo acceptance probabilities that has the

Genome-wide association studies have identified thousands of genetic variants that are associated with complex traits. Many complex traits are shown to share genetic etiology. Although various genetic correlation measures and their estimators have been developed, rigorous statistical analysis of their properties, including their robustness to model assumptions, is still lacking. We develop a method

Chatterjee (2021+) introduced a simple new rank correlation coefficient that has attracted much recent attention. The coefficient has the unusual appeal that it not only estimates a population quantity first proposed by Dette et al. (2013) that is zero if and only if the underlying pair of random variables is independent, but also is asymptotically normal under independence. This paper compares Chatterjee’s

We investigate estimation of a normal mean matrix under the matrix quadratic loss. Improved estimation under the matrix quadratic loss implies improved estimation of any linear combination of the columns under the quadratic loss. First, an unbiased estimate of risk is derived and the Efron–Morris estimator is shown to be minimax. Next, a notion of matrix superharmonicity for matrix-variate functions

Space-filling designs are widely used in computer experiments. Inspired by the stratified orthogonality of strong orthogonal arrays, we propose a minimum aberration type criterion for assessing the space-filling properties of designs based on design stratification properties on various grids. A space-filling hierarchy principle is proposed as a basic assumption of the criterion. The new criterion provides

In microbiome and genomic studies, the regression of compositional data has been a crucial tool for identifying microbial taxa or genes that are associated with clinical phenotypes. To account for the variation in sequencing depth, the classic log-contrast model is often used where read counts are normalized into compositions. However, zero read counts and the randomness in covariates remain critical

We study the selection of adjustment sets for estimating the interventional mean under a point exposure dynamic treatment regime, that is, a treatment rule that depends on the subject’s covariates. We assume a non-parametric causal graphical model with, possibly, hidden variables and at least one adjustment set comprised of observable variables. We provide the definition of a valid adjustment set for

Unobserved confounding presents a major threat to causal inference from observational studies. Recently, several authors suggest that this problem may be overcome in a shared confounding setting where multiple treatments are independent given a common latent confounder. It has been shown that under a linear Gaussian model for the treatments, the causal effect is not identifiable without parametric

Covariate-adaptive randomization schemes such as minimization and stratified permuted blocks are often applied in clinical trials to balance treatment assignments across prognostic factors. The existing theory for inference after covariate-adaptive randomization is mostly limited to situations where a correct model between the response and covariates can be specified or the randomization method has

Most Markov chain Monte Carlo methods operate in discrete time and are reversible with respect to the target probability. Nevertheless, it is now understood that the use of nonreversible Markov chains can be beneficial in many contexts. In particular, the recently-proposed bouncy particle sampler leverages a continuous-time and nonreversible Markov process and empirically shows state-of-the-art performances

While the cost of sequencing genomes has decreased dramatically in recent years, this expense often remains non-trivial. Under a fixed budget, scientists face a natural trade-off between quantity and quality: spending resources to sequence a greater number of genomes or spending resources to sequence genomes with increased accuracy. Our goal is to find the optimal allocation of resources between quantity

Single-index models have gained increased popularity in time-to-event analysis owing to their model flexibility and advantage in dimension reduction. In this paper, we propose a semiparametric framework for the rate function of a recurrent event counting process by modelling its size and shape components with single-index models. With additional monotone constraints on the two link functions for the

Sequential Monte Carlo algorithms have been widely accepted as a powerful computational tool for making inference with dynamical systems. A key step in sequential Monte Carlo is resampling, which plays a role of steering the algorithm towards the future dynamics. Several strategies have been used in practice, including multinomial resampling, residual resampling, optimal resampling, stratified resampling

A problem of major interest in network data analysis is to explain the strength of connections using context information. To achieve this, we introduce a novel approach named network-supervised dimension reduction by projecting covariates onto low-dimensional spaces for revealing the linkage pattern, without assuming a model.We propose a new loss function for estimating the parameters in the resulting

Instrumental variables are widely used to deal with unmeasured confounding in observational studies and imperfect randomized controlled trials. In these studies, researchers often target the so-called local average treatment effect as it is identifiable under mild conditions. In this paper, we consider estimation of the local average treatment effect under the binary instrumental variable model. We

We offer a natural and extensible measure-theoretic treatment of missingness at random. Within the standard missing data framework, we give a novel characterization of the observed data as a stopping-set sigma algebra. We demonstrate that the usual missingness at random conditions are equivalent to requiring particular stochastic processes to be adapted to a set-indexed filtration. These measurability

This paper investigates a divide-and-conquer algorithm for estimating the extreme value index when data are stored in multiple machines. The oracle property of such an algorithm based on extreme value methods is not guaranteed by the general theory of distributed inference. We propose a distributed Hill estimator and establish its asymptotic theories. We consider various cases where the number of observations

Model selection is crucial both to high-dimensional learning and to inference for contemporary big data applications in pinpointing the best set of covariates among a sequence of candidate interpretable models. Most existing work assumes implicitly that the models are correctly specified or have fixed dimensionality, yet both are prevalent in practice. In this paper, we exploit the framework of model

Extending R. A. Fisher and D. A. Freedman's results on the analysis of covariance, Lin [2013] proposed an ordinary least squares adjusted estimator of the average treatment effect in completely randomized experiments. We further study its statistical properties under the potential outcomes model in the asymptotic regimes allowing for a diverging number of covariates. We show that Lin [2013]'s estimator

We study admissibility of a subclass of generalized Bayes estimators of a multivariate normal vector when the variance is unknown, under scaled quadratic loss. Minimaxity is also established for certain of these estimators.

The family-wise error rate (FWER) has been widely used in genome-wide association studies. With the increasing availability of functional genomics data, it is possible to increase the detection power by leveraging these genomic functional annotations. Previous efforts to accommodate covariates in multiple testing focus on the false discovery rate control while covariate-adaptive FWER-controlling procedures

Progression of chronic disease is often manifested by repeated occurrences of disease-related events over time. Delineating the heterogeneity in the risk of such recurrent events can provide valuable scientific insight for guiding customized disease management. In this paper, we present a new dynamic modeling framework, which renders a flexible and robust characterization of individual risk of recurrent

Persistent homology is used to track the appearance and disappearance of features as we move through a nested sequence of topological spaces. Equating the nested sequence to a filtration and the appearance and disappearance of features to events, we show that simple event history methods can be used for the analysis of topological data. We propose a version of the well known Nelson-Aalen cumulative

Approximate Bayesian computation methods are useful for generative models with intractable likelihoods. These methods are however sensitive to the dimension of the parameter space, requiring exponentially increasing resources as this dimension grows. To tackle this difficulty, we explore a Gibbs version of the ABC approach that runs component-wise approximate Bayesian computation steps aimed at the

A property, or statistical functional, is said to be elicitable if it minimizes expected loss for some loss function. The study of which properties are elicitable sheds light on the capabilities and limitations of point estimation and empirical risk minimization. While recent work asks which properties are elicitable, we instead advocate for a more nuanced question: how many dimensions are required

Estimation of mean and covariance functions is fundamental for functional data analysis. While this topic has been studied extensively in the literature, a key assumption is that there are enough data in the domain of interest to estimate both the mean and covariance functions. In this paper, we investigate mean and covariance estimation for functional snippets in which observations from a subject

High-dimensional statistical inference with general estimating equations are challenging and remain less explored. In this paper, we study two problems in the area: confidence set estimation for multiple components of the model parameters, and model specifications test. For the first one, we propose to construct a new set of estimating equations such that the impact from estimating the high-dimensional

Learning an individualized dose rule in personalized medicine is a challenging statistical problem. Existing methods for estimating the optimal individualized dose rule often suffer from the curse of dimensionality, especially when the dose rule is learned nonparametrically using machine learning approaches. To tackle this problem, we propose a dimension reduction framework that effectively reduces

Interventional effects for mediation analysis were proposed as a solution to the lack of identifiability of natural (in)direct effects in the presence of a mediator-outcome confounder affected by exposure. We present a theoretical and computational study of the properties of the interventional (in)direct effect estimands based on the efficient influence fucntion (EIF) in the non-parametric statistical

Motivated by the problem of estimating the bacterial growth rates for genome assemblies from shotgun metagenomic data, we consider the permuted monotone matrix model $Y=\Theta\Pi+Z$, where $Y\in \mathbb{R}^{n\times p}$ is observed, $\Theta\in \mathbb{R}^{n\times p}$ is an unknown approximately rank-one signal matrix with monotone rows, $\Pi \in \mathbb{R}^{p\times p}$ is an unknown permutation matrix

This paper sheds light on inference problems for statistical models under alternative or nonstandard asymptotic frameworks from the perspective of jackknife empirical likelihood. Examples include small bandwidth asymptotics for semiparametric inference and goodness-offit testing, sparse network asymptotics, many covariates asymptotics for regression models, and many-weak instruments asymptotics for

The availability of data sets with large numbers of variables is rapidly increasing. The effective application of Bayesian variable selection methods for regression with these data sets has proved difficult since available Markov chain Monte Carlo methods do not perform well in typical problem sizes of interest. The current paper proposes new adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms to address

Survival analysis relies on the hypothesis that, if the follow-up will be long enough, the event of interest will eventually be observed for all observations. This assumption, however, is often not realistic. The survival data then contain a cure fraction. A common approach to model and analyse this type of data consists in using cure models. Two types of information can therefore be obtained: the

We propose the cyclic permutation test (CPT) to test general linear hypotheses for linear models. This test is non-randomized and valid in finite samples with exact type-I error $\alpha$ for arbitrary fixed design matrix and arbitrary exchangeable errors, whenever $1 / \alpha$ is an integer and $n / p \ge 1 / \alpha - 1$. The test applies the marginal rank test on $1 / \alpha$ linear statistics of

A sensitivity analysis in an observational study tests whether the qualitative conclusions of an analysis would change if we were to allow for the possibility of limited bias due to confounding. The design sensitivity of a hypothesis test quantifies the asymptotic performance of the test in a sensitivity analysis against a particular alternative. We propose a new, non-asymptotic, distribution-free

Flexible estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects lies at the heart of many statistical challenges, such as personalized medicine and optimal resource allocation. In this paper, we develop a general class of two-step algorithms for heterogeneous treatment effect estimation in observational studies. We first estimate marginal effects and treatment propensities in order to form an objective function

Wilk's theorem, which offers universal chi-squared approximations for likelihood ratio tests, is widely used in many scientific hypothesis testing problems. For modern datasets with increasing dimension, researchers have found that the conventional Wilk's phenomenon of the likelihood ratio test statistic often fails. Although new approximations have been proposed in high dimensional settings, there

Dynamical systems based on differential equations are useful for modelling the temporal evolution of biomarkers. Such systems can characterize the temporal patterns of biomarkers and inform the detection of interactions between biomarkers. Existing statistical methods for dynamical systems deal mostly with single time-course data based on a linear model or generalized additive model. Hence, they cannot

Statistical analysis on networks has received growing attention due to demand from various emerging applications. In dynamic networks, one of the key interests is to model the event history of time-stamped interactions among nodes. We model dynamic directed networks via multivariate counting processes. A pseudo partial likelihood approach is exploited to capture the network dependence structure. Asymptotic

We consider the problem of segmented linear regression with a single breakpoint, with the focus on estimating the location of the breakpoint. If |$n$| is the sample size, we show that the global minimax convergence rate for this problem in terms of the mean absolute error is |$O(n^{-1/3})$|⁠. On the other hand, we demonstrate the construction of a super-efficient estimator that achieves the pointwise

We establish a general theory of optimality for block bootstrap distribution estimation for sample quantiles under mild strong mixing conditions. In contrast to existing results, we study the block bootstrap for varying numbers of blocks. This corresponds to a hybrid between the subsampling bootstrap and the moving block bootstrap, in which the number of blocks is between 1 and the ratio of sample

We study posterior contraction rates in sparse high-dimensional generalized linear models using priors incorporating sparsity. A mixture of a point mass at zero and a continuous distribution is used as the prior distribution on regression coefficients. In addition to the usual posterior, the fractional posterior, which is obtained by applying the Bayes theorem on a fractional power of the likelihood

We consider testing the covariance structure in statistical models. We focus on developing such tests when the random vectors of interest are not directly observable and have to be derived via estimated models. Additionally, the covariance specification may involve extra nuisance parameters which also need to be estimated. In a generic additive model setting, we develop and investigate test statistics

Eliminating the effect of confounding in observational studies typically involves fitting a model for an outcome adjusted for covariates. When, as often, these covariates are high-dimensional, this necessitates the use of sparse estimators such as the Lasso, or other regularisation approaches. Naϊve use of such estimators yields confidence intervals for the conditional treatment effect parameter that

Differential graphical models are designed to represent the difference between the conditional dependence structures of two groups, thus are of particular interest for scientific investigation. Motivated by modern applications, this manuscript considers an extended setting where each group is generated by a latent variable Gaussian graphical model. Due to the existence of latent factors, the differential

Advances in wearables and digital technology now make it possible to deliver behavioral mobile health interventions to individuals in their everyday life. The micro-randomized trial (MRT) is increasingly used to provide data to inform the construction of these interventions. In an MRT, each individual is repeatedly randomized among multiple intervention options, often hundreds or even thousands of

Information criteria are a common approach for joint fixed and random effects selection in mixed models. While straightforward to implement, a major difficultly when applying information criteria is that they are typically based on maximum likelihood estimates, yet calculating such estimates for one, let alone multiple, candidate mixed models presents a major computational hurdle. To overcome this

In this article we study a class of parameters with the so-called `mixed bias property'. For parameters with this property, the bias of the semiparametric efficient one step estimator is equal to the mean of the product of the estimation errors of two nuisance functions. In non-parametric models, parameters with the mixed bias property admit so-called rate doubly robust estimators, i.e. estimators

Large samples are generated routinely from various sources. Classic statistical models, such as smoothing spline ANOVA models, are not well equipped to analyse such large samples because of high computational costs. In particular, the daunting computational cost of selecting smoothing parameters renders smoothing spline ANOVA models impractical. In this article, we develop an asympirical, i.e., asymptotic

Posterior computation for high-dimensional data with many parameters can be challenging. This article focuses on a new method for approximating posterior distributions of a low- to moderate-dimensional parameter in the presence of a high-dimensional or otherwise computationally challenging nuisance parameter. The focus is on regression models and the key idea is to separate the likelihood into two

Countless test statistics can be written as quadratic forms in certain random vectors, or ratios thereof. Consequently, their distribution has received considerable attention in the literature. Except for a few special cases, no closed-form expression for the cdf exists, and one resorts to numerical methods. Traditionally the problem is analyzed under the assumption of joint Gaussianity; the algorithm

This paper develops a unified finite-time theory for the ordinary least squares estimation of possibly unstable and even slightly explosive vector autoregressive models under linear restrictions, with the applicable region $\rho(A)\leq 1+c/n$, where $\rho(A)$ is the spectral radius of the transition matrix $A$ in the \VAR(1) representation, $n$ is the time horizon and $c>0$ is a universal constant

Penalization of the likelihood by Jeffreys' invariant prior, or by a positive power thereof, is shown to produce finite-valued maximum penalized likelihood estimates in a broad class of binomial generalized linear models. The class of models includes logistic regression, where the Jeffreys-prior penalty is known additionally to reduce the asymptotic bias of the maximum likelihood estimator; and also

Paradata refers to survey variables which are not of direct interest themselves, but are related to the quality of data on survey variables which are of interest. We focus on a categorical paradata variable, which reflects the presence of measurement error in a variable of interest. We propose a quasi-score test of the hypothesis of no measurement error bias in the estimation of regression coefficients