Abstract Multimodal data, where different types of data are collected from the same subjects, are fast emerging in a large variety of scientific applications. Factor analysis is commonly used in integrative analysis of multimodal data, and is particularly useful to overcome the curse of high dimensionality and high correlations. However, there is little work on statistical inference for factor analysis

Abstract In genome-wide epigenetic studies, it is of great scientific interest to assess whether the effect of an exposure on a clinical outcome is mediated through DNA methylations. However, statistical inference for causal mediation effects is challenged by the fact that one needs to test a large number of composite null hypotheses across the whole epigenome. Two popular tests, the Wald-type Sobel’s

Abstract Large tensor (multi-dimensional array) data routinely appear nowadays in a wide range of applications, due to modern data collection capabilities. Often such observations are taken over time, forming tensor time series. In this paper we present a factor model approach to the analysis of high-dimensional dynamic tensor time series and multi-category dynamic transport networks. Two estimation

Abstract Testing for dependence between pairs of random variables is a fundamental problem in statistics. In some applications, data are subject to selection bias that can create spurious dependence. An important example is truncation models, in which observed pairs are restricted to a specific subset of the X-Y plane. Standard tests for independence are not suitable in such cases, and alternative

Abstract For multiple change-points detection of high-dimensional time series, we provide asymptotic theory concerning the consistency and the asymptotic distribution of the breakpoint statistics and estimated break sizes. The theory backs up a simple two-step procedure for detecting and estimating multiple change-points. The proposed two-step procedure involves the maximum of a MOSUM (moving sum)

Abstract Quantification learning is the task of prevalence estimation for a test population using predictions from a classifier trained on a different population. Quantification methods assume that the sensitivities and specificities of the classifier are either perfect or transportable from the training to the test population. These assumptions are inappropriate in the presence of dataset shift, when

(2021). Rejoinder: Learning Optimal Distributionally Robust Individualized Treatment Rules. Journal of the American Statistical Association. Ahead of Print.

(2021). Rejoinder: New Objectives for Policy Learning. Journal of the American Statistical Association. Ahead of Print.

(2021). Discussion of Kallus (2020) and Mo, Qi, and Liu (2020): New Objectives for Policy Learning. Journal of the American Statistical Association. Ahead of Print.

(2021). Discussion of Kallus and Mo, Qi, and Liu: New Objectives for Policy Learning. Journal of the American Statistical Association. Ahead of Print.

Abstract We discuss the results on improving the generalizability of individualized treatment rule following the work by Kallus and Mo et al. We note that the advocated weights in the work of Kallus are connected to the efficient score of the contrast function. We further propose a likelihood-ratio-based method (LR-ITR) to accommodate covariate shifts, and compare it to the CTE-DR-ITR method proposed

Abstract Whilst there are a plethora of algorithms for detecting changes in mean in univariate time-series, almost all struggle in real applications where there is autocorrelated noise or where the mean fluctuates locally between the abrupt changes that one wishes to detect. In these cases, default implementations, which are often based on assumptions of a constant mean between changes and independent

Abstract The use of non-differentiable priors in Bayesian statistics has become increasingly popular, in particular in Bayesian imaging analysis. Current state of the art methods are approximate in the sense that they replace the posterior with a smooth approximation via Moreau-Yosida envelopes, and apply gradient-based discretized diffusions to sample from the resulting distribution. We characterize

Abstract There is a growing expectation that data collected by government-funded studies should be openly available to ensure research reproducibility, which also increases concerns about data privacy. A strategy to protect individuals’ identity is to release multiply imputed (MI) synthetic datasets with masked sensitivity values (Rubin, 1993). However, information loss or incorrectly specified imputation

Abstract This article develops design-based ratio estimators for clustered, blocked randomized controlled trials (RCTs), with an application to a federally funded, school-based RCT testing the effects of behavioral health interventions. We consider finite population weighted least squares estimators for average treatment effects (ATEs), allowing for general weighting schemes and covariates. We consider

Abstract Cross-trait polygenic risk score (PRS) method has gained popularity for assessing genetic correlation of complex traits using summary statistics from biobank-scale genome-wide association studies (GWAS). However, empirical evidence has shown a common bias phenomenon that highly significant cross-trait PRS can only account for a very small amount of genetic variance (R2 can be <1%) in independent

Abstract Evidence based decision making often relies on meta-analyzing multiple studies, which enables more precise estimation and investigation of generalizability. Integrative analysis of multiple heterogeneous studies is, however, highly challenging in the ultra high dimensional setting. The challenge is even more pronounced when the individual level data cannot be shared across studies, known as

Abstract A growing interest in non-Gaussian time series, particularly in series comprised of non-negative integers (counts), is taking place in today’s statistics literature. Count series naturally arise in fields such as agriculture, economics, epidemiology, finance, geology, meteorology, sports, etc.. Unlike stationary Gaussian series where autoregressive moving-averages are the primary modeling

Abstract Modern scientific studies often collect data sets in the form of tensors. These datasets call for innovative statistical analysis methods. In particular, there is a pressing need for tensor clustering methods to understand the heterogeneity in the data. We propose a tensor normal mixture model approach to enable probabilistic interpretation and computational tractability. Our statistical model

Abstract Fusion learning refers to synthesizing inferences from multiple sources or studies to make more effective inference and prediction than from any individual source or study alone. Most existing methods for synthesizing inferences rely on parametric model assumptions, such as normality, which often do not hold in practice. We propose a general nonparametric fusion learning framework for synthesizing

Abstract We consider functional responses with network dependence observed for each individual at irregular time points. To model both the interindividual dependence and within-individual dynamic correlation, we propose a network functional varying coefficient (NFVC) model. The response of each individual is characterized by a linear combination of responses from its connected nodes and its exogenous

Abstract With the severity of the COVID-19 outbreak, we characterize the nature of the growth trajectories of counties in the United States using a novel combination of spectral clustering and the correlation matrix. As the U.S. and the rest of the world are still suffering from the effects of the virus, the importance of assigning growth membership to counties and understanding the determinants of

Abstract In this paper, the authors derive the likelihood-based exact inference for singly and multiply imputed synthetic data in the context of a multivariate regression model. The synthetic data are generated via the Plug-in Sampling method, where the unknown parameters in the model are set equal to the observed values of their point estimators based on the original data, and synthetic data are drawn

Abstract Noncompliance with assigned treatments is a common challenge in analyzing and interpreting randomized clinical trials (RCTs). One way to handle noncompliance is to estimate the complier-average causal effect (CACE), the intervention’s efficacy in the subpopulation that complies with assigned treatment. In a two-step meta-analysis, one could first estimate CACE for each study, then combine

Abstract In this paper we study methods for estimating causal effects in settings with panel data, where some units are exposed to a treatment during some periods and the goal is estimating counterfactual (untreated) outcomes for the treated unit/period combinations. We propose a class of matrix completion estimators that uses the observed elements of the matrix of control outcomes corresponding to

Abstract We introduce the Theory and Methods Special Issue on Precision Medicine and Individualized Policy Discovery. The issue consists of four discussion papers, grouped into two pairs, and sixteen regular research papers that cover many important lines of research on data-driven decision making. We hope that the many provocative and original ideas presented herein will inspire further work and development

(2021). Comment: Individualized Treatment Rules Under Endogeneity. Journal of the American Statistical Association: Vol. 116, No. 533, pp. 192-195.

(2021). Discussion of Cui and Tchetgen Tchetgen (2020) and Qiu et al. (2020) Journal of the American Statistical Association: Vol. 116, No. 533, pp. 196-199.

(2021). Machine Intelligence for Individualized Decision Making Under a Counterfactual World: A Rejoinder. Journal of the American Statistical Association: Vol. 116, No. 533, pp. 200-206.

(2021). Rejoinder: Optimal Individualized Decision Rules Using Instrumental Variable Methods. Journal of the American Statistical Association: Vol. 116, No. 533, pp. 207-209.

Abstract We derive new estimators of an optimal joint testing and treatment regime under the no direct effect (NDE) assumption that a given laboratory, diagnostic, or screening test has no effect on a patient’s clinical outcomes except through the effect of the test results on the choice of treatment. We model the optimal joint strategy with an optimal structural nested mean model (opt-SNMM). The proposed

Abstract With a large number of baseline covariates, we propose a new semiparametric modeling strategy for heterogeneous treatment effect estimation and individualized treatment selection, which are two major goals in personalized medicine. We achieve the first goal through estimating a covariate-specific treatment effect (CSTE) curve modeled as an unknown function of a weighted linear combination

Abstract Transitional inference is an empiricism concept, rooted and practiced in clinical medicine since ancient Greece. Knowledge and experiences gained from treating one entity (e.g., a disease or a group of patients) are applied to treat a related but distinctively different one (e.g., a similar disease or a new patient). This notion of “transition to the similar” renders individualized treatments

Abstract Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are generally regarded as the gold standard technique for Bayesian inference. They are theoretically well-understood and conceptually simple to apply in practice. The drawback of MCMC is that performing exact inference generally requires all of the data to be processed at each iteration of the algorithm. For large datasets, the computational cost

(2021). Handbook of Spatial Epidemiology. Journal of the American Statistical Association: Vol. 116, No. 533, pp. 451-453.

(2021). Handbook of Environmental and Ecological Statistics. Journal of the American Statistical Association: Vol. 116, No. 533, pp. 453-455.

Abstract Reported gang-related violent crimes in Los Angeles, California, from 1/1/14 to 12/31/17 are modeled using spatial-temporal marked Hawkes point processes with covariates. We propose an algorithm to estimate the spatial-temporally varying background rate non-parametrically as a function of demographic covariates. Kernel smoothing and generalized additive models are used in an attempt to model

Abstract How to dynamically measure the local-to-global spatio-temporal coherence between demand and supply networks is a fundamental task for ride-sourcing platforms, such as DiDi. Such coherence measurement is critically important for the quantification of the market efficiency and the comparison of different platform policies, such as dispatching. The aim of this paper is to introduce a graph-based

ABSTRACT Discrete Markov random fields are undirected graphical models in which the nodes of a graph are discrete random variables with values usually represented by colors. Typically, graphs are taken to be square lattices, although more general graphs are also of interest. Such discrete MRFs have been studied in many disciplines. We describe the two most popular types of discrete MRFs, namely, the

Abstract The pandemic of COVID-19 has caused severe public health consequences around the world. Many interventions of COVID-19 have been implemented. It is of great public health and social importance to evaluate the effects of interventions in the pandemic of COVID-19. With the help of a synthetic control method, the regression discontinuity, and a state-space compartmental model, we evaluated the

Abstract In this paper we derive the asymptotic distribution of estimated best linear unbiased predictors (EBLUPs) of the random effects in a nested error regression model. Under very mild conditions which do not require the assumption of normality, we show that asymptotically the distribution of the EBLUPs as both the number of clusters and the cluster sizes diverge to infinity is the convolution

Abstract Network data often arises via a series of structured interactions among a population of constituent elements. E-mail exchanges, for example, have a single sender followed by potentially multiple receivers. Scientific articles, on the other hand, may have multiple subject areas and multiple authors. We introduce a statistical model, termed the Pitman-Yor hierarchical vertex components model

Abstract A central question in high-dimensional mediation analysis is to infer the significance of individual mediators. The main challenge is that the total number of potential paths that go through any mediator is super-exponential in the number of mediators. Most existing mediation inference solutions either explicitly impose that the mediators are conditionally independent given the exposure, or

Abstract Predicting risks of chronic diseases has become increasingly important in clinical practice. When a prediction model is developed in a cohort, there is a great interest to apply the model to other cohorts. Due to potential discrepancy in baseline disease incidences between different cohorts and shifts in patient composition, the risk predicted by the model built in the source cohort often

Abstract Latent time series models such as (the independent sum of) ARMA(p, q) models with additional stochastic processes are increasingly used for data analysis in biology, ecology, engineering and economics. Inference on and/or prediction from these models can be highly challenging: (i) the data may contain outliers that can adversely affect the estimation procedure; (ii) the computational complexity

Abstract Deep learning has been the engine powering many successes of data science. However, the deep neural network (DNN), as the basic model of deep learning, is often excessively over-parameterized, causing many difficulties in training, prediction and interpretation. We propose a frequentist-like method for learning sparse DNNs and justify its consistency under the Bayesian framework: the proposed

Abstract We consider the estimation problem in a regression setting where the outcome variable is subject to nonignorable missingness and identifiability is ensured by the shadow variable approach. We propose a versatile estimation procedure where modeling of missingness mechanism is completely bypassed. We show that our estimator is easy to implement and we derive the asymptotic theory of the proposed

Abstract In many applications, smooth processes generate data that is recorded under a variety of observational regimes, including dense sampling and sparse or fragmented observations that are often contaminated with error. The statistical goal of registering and estimating the individual underlying functions from discrete observations has thus far been mainly approached sequentially without formal

Abstract Statistical inferences for quadratic functionals of linear regression parameter have found wide applications including signal detection, global testing, inferences of error variance and fraction of variance explained. Classical theory based on ordinary least squares estimator works perfectly in the low-dimensional regime, but fails when the parameter dimension pn grows proportionally to the

Abstract In ordinary quantile regression, quantiles of different order are estimated one at a time. An alternative approach, which is referred to as quantile regression coefficients modeling (qrcm), is to model quantile regression coefficients as parametric functions of the order of the quantile. In this paper, we describe how the QRCM paradigm can be applied to longitudinal data. We introduce a two-level

Abstract Multisample covariance estimation—that is, estimation of the covariance matrices associated with k distinct populations—is a classical problem in multivariate statistics. A common solution is to base estimation on the outcome of a test that these covariance matrices show some given pattern. Such a preliminary test may, e.g., investigate whether or not the various covariance matrices are equal

Abstract Prediction is critical for decision-making under uncertainty and lends validity to statistical inference. With targeted prediction, the goal is to optimize predictions for specific decision tasks of interest, which we represent via functionals. Although classical decision analysis extracts predictions from a Bayesian model, these predictions are often difficult to interpret and slow to compute

Abstract Benford’s law defines a probability distribution for patterns of significant digits in real numbers. When the law is expected to hold for genuine observations, deviation from it can be taken as evidence of possible data manipulation. We derive results on a transform of the significand function that provide motivation for new tests of conformance to Benford’s law exploiting its sum-invariance

Abstract This paper studies distributed estimation and inference for a general statistical problem with a convex loss that could be non-differentiable. For the purpose of efficient computation, we restrict ourselves to stochastic first-order optimization, which enjoys low per-iteration complexity. To motivate the proposed method, we first investigate the theoretical properties of a straightforward

Abstract In the context of a Gaussian multiple regression model, we address the problem of variable selection when in the list of potential predictors there are factors, i.e., categorical variables. We adopt a model selection perspective, that is, we approach the problem by constructing a class of models, each corresponding to a particular selection of active variables. The methodology is Bayesian

Abstract Linear mixed-effects models are widely used in analyzing clustered or repeated measures data. We propose a quasi-likelihood approach for estimation and inference of the unknown parameters in linear mixed-effects models with high-dimensional fixed effects. The proposed method is applicable to general settings where the dimension of the random effects and the cluster sizes are possibly large

Abstract In this paper we study a generalization of the two-groups model in the presence of covariates — a problem that has recently received much attention in the statistical literature due to its applicability in multiple hypotheses testing problems. The model we consider allows for infinite dimensional parameters and offers flexibility in modeling the dependence of the response on the covariates

Abstract Spatial processes with nonstationary and anisotropic covariance structure are often used when modelling, analysing and predicting complex environmental phenomena. Such processes may often be expressed as ones that have stationary and isotropic covariance structure on a warped spatial domain. However, the warping function is generally difficult to fit and not constrained to be injective, often

Abstract Community detection in network data aims at grouping similar nodes sharing certain characteristics together. Most existing methods focus on detecting communities in undirected networks, where similarity between nodes is measured by their node features and whether they are connected. In this article, we propose a novel method to conduct network embedding and community detection simultaneously

Abstract The growing size of modern data sets brings many challenges to the existing statistical estimation approaches, which calls for new distributed methodologies. This paper studies distributed estimation for a fundamental statistical machine learning problem, principal component analysis (PCA). Despite the massive literature on top eigenvector estimation, much less is presented for the top-L-dim