Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2009.07805

An Intrinsic Treatment of Stochastic Linear Regression

Yu-Lin Chou
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Linear regression is perhaps one of the most popular statistical concepts, which permeates almost every scientific field of study. Due to the technical simplicity and wide applicability of linear regression, attention is almost always quickly directed to the algorithmic or computational side of linear regression. In particular, the underlying mathematics of stochastic linear regression itself as an entity usually gets either a peripheral treatment or a relatively in-depth but ad hoc treatment depending on the type of concerned problems; in other words, compared to the extensiveness of the study of mathematical properties of the "derivatives" of stochastic linear regression such as the least squares estimator, the mathematics of stochastic linear regression itself seems to have not yet received a due intrinsic treatment. Apart from the conceptual importance, a consequence of an insufficient or possibly inaccurate understanding of stochastic linear regression would be the recurrence for the role of stochastic linear regression in the important (and more sophisticated) context of structural equation modeling to be misperceived or taught in a misleading way. We believe this pity is rectifiable when the fundamental concepts are correctly classified. Accompanied by some illustrative, distinguishing examples and counterexamples, we intend to pave out the mathematical framework for stochastic linear regression, in a rigorous but non-technical way, by giving new results and pasting together several fundamental known results that are, we believe, both enlightening and conceptually useful, and that had not yet been systematically documented in the related literature. As a minor contribution, the way we arrange the fundamental known results would be the first attempt in the related literature.

Explore related subjects

math.STstat.TH

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Yu-Lin Chou. 2020-09-16. An Intrinsic Treatment of Stochastic Linear Regression. https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.07805

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

A Scale Invariance Property of PCA

The PCA algorithm is sensitive to changes in measurement scale. Measuring one variable of a system in inches rather than centimeters, say, alters both its principal axes and principal eigenvalues. Although this scale dependence is generally complicated, we show here that it nevertheless obeys a strict invariance property: under a continuous scale adjustment, the initial state's $k$-th largest principal component (ordered by eigenvalue) continuously evolves into the final state's $k$-th largest principal component, for each $k$. In this sense, we can say that the modes of PCA are "order-stable" with respect to changes in measurement scale. A special case occurs when scaling along directions that are orthogonal to some modes. Here, apparent eigenvalue crossings can occur. However, we show that we can interpret these apparent crossings as cases where the modes instantaneously swap their orientation, in this way maintaining the required order stability.

math.ST↗
arXiv2026

Small noise asymptotics for linear parabolic SPDEs in two space dimensions with unknown damping factors

We study parametric estimation for second order linear parabolic stochastic partial differential equations in two space dimensions with a small volatility parameter driven by a $Q$-Wiener process with an unknown damping parameter using high frequency spatio-temporal data. We first provide an estimator for the damping parameter of the $Q$-Wiener process utilizing realized quadratic variations based on spatial and temporal increments. We next propose minimum contrast estimators of the diffusive and advective parameters in the SPDE using a contrast function with the proposed estimator of the damping parameter. We then construct a quasi-maximum likelihood estimator of the reaction parameter in the SPDE using the approximate coordinate process derived from the estimators of the diffusive and advective parameters. We also provide simulation results of the proposed estimators.

math.ST↗
arXiv2026

Spike Estimation from Heteroscedastic Noise via Random Splitting

In this paper, we consider a spiked Wigner type matrix with a heteroscedastic and unknown variance profile. It is well known that in the supercritical regime of the BBP transition, strong spikes can create outliers in the spectrum. Unfortunately, in the heteroscedastic case, in general it is not possible to estimate the spike strength from these observed outlier consistently, as the latter is a solution to a Dyson equation with unknown parameters from the variance profile. In this paper, inspired by the work on sparse matrix completion \citep{BordenaveCosteNadakuditi2023}, we introduce an asymmetrized model by randomly splitting the spiked matrix into two parts, which transforms the noisy Wigner type matrix into a non Hermitian random matrix, while preserving the Hermitian spikes at the cost of a dilution. We establish a BBP type transition for the asymmetrized model, from which we can estimate the strength of the spikes precisely, even without knowing the variance profile of the noise part. We then further apply our approach to study the correlation between two correlated spiked models, where the spike/signal parts of the two models are correlated, and the noise parts are independent but may both be heteroscedastic. By applying our asymmetrization approach to the two models separately and also jointly, we are able to obtain a precise estimate of the correlation between the signal parts of the two models.

math.ST↗