Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Hernando Ombao

Publications and source records attributed to Hernando Ombao.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

Functional time series prediction under partial observation of the future curve

This paper tackles one of the most fundamental goals in functional time series analysis which is to provide reliable predictions for future functions. Existing methods for predicting a complete future functional observation use only completely observed trajectories. We develop a new method, called partial functional prediction (PFP), which uses both completely observed trajectories and partial information (available partial data) on the trajectory to be predicted. The PFP method includes an automatic selection criterion for tuning parameters based on minimizing the prediction error, and the convergence rate of the PFP prediction is established. Simulation studies demonstrate that incorporating partially observed trajectory in the prediction outperforms existing methods with respect to mean squared prediction error. The PFP method is illustrated to be superior in the analysis of environmental data and traffic flow data.

stat.ME↗

Break Point Detection for Functional Covariance

Many experiments record sequential trajectories where each trajectory consists of oscillations and fluctuations around zero. Such trajectories can be viewed as zero-mean functional data. When there are structural breaks (on the sequence of trajectories) in higher order moments, it is not always easy to spot these by mere visual inspection. Motivated by this challenging problem in brain signal analysis, we propose a detection and testing procedure to find the change point in functional covariance. The detection procedure is based on the cumulative sum statistics (CUSUM). The classical testing procedure for functional data depends on a null distribution which depends on infinitely many unknown parameters, though in practice only a finite number of these can be included for the hypothesis test of the existence of change point. This paper provides some theoretical insights on the influence of the number of parameters. Meanwhile, the asymptotic properties of the estimated change point are developed. The effectiveness of the proposed method is numerically validated in simulation studies and an application to investigate changes in rat brain signals following an experimentally-induced stroke.

stat.ME↗

Shape-Preserving Prediction for Stationary Functional Time Series

This article presents a novel method for prediction of stationary functional time series, in particular for trajectories that share a similar pattern but display variable phases. The limitation of most of the existing prediction methodologies for functional time series is that they only consider vertical variation (amplitude, scale, or vertical shift). To overcome this limitation, we develop a shape-preserving (SP) prediction method that incorporates both vertical and horizontal variation. One major advantage of our proposed method is the ability to preserve the shape of functions. Moreover, our proposed SP method does not involve unnatural transformations and can be easily implemented using existing software packages. The utility of the SP method is demonstrated in the analysis of non-metanic hydrocarbons (NMHC) concentration. The analysis demonstrates that the prediction by the SP method captures the common pattern better than the existing prediction methods and also provides competitive prediction accuracy.

stat.ME↗

Statistical Inference for Local Granger Causality

Granger causality has been employed to investigate causality relations between components of stationary multiple time series. We generalize this concept by developing statistical inference for local Granger causality for multivariate locally stationary processes. Our proposed local Granger causality approach captures time-evolving causality relationships in nonstationary processes. The proposed local Granger causality is well represented in the frequency domain and estimated based on the parametric time-varying spectral density matrix using the local Whittle likelihood. Under regularity conditions, we demonstrate that the estimators converge to multivariate normal in distribution. Additionally, the test statistic for the local Granger causality is shown to be asymptotically distributed as a quadratic form of a multivariate normal distribution. The finite sample performance is confirmed with several simulation studies for multivariate time-varying autoregressive models. For practical demonstration, the proposed local Granger causality method uncovered new functional connectivity relationships between channels in brain signals. Moreover, the method was able to identify structural changes in financial data.

stat.ME↗

Lattice Paths for Persistent Diagrams

Persistent homology has undergone significant development in recent years. However, one outstanding challenge is to build a coherent statistical inference procedure on persistent diagrams. In this paper, we first present a new lattice path representation for persistent diagrams. We then develop a new exact statistical inference procedure for lattice paths via combinatorial enumerations. The lattice path method is applied to the topological characterization of the protein structures of the COVID-19 virus. We demonstrate that there are topological changes during the conformational change of spike proteins.

stat.ML↗

BICNet: A Bayesian Approach for Estimating Task Effects on Intrinsic Connectivity Networks in fMRI Data

Intrinsic connectivity networks (ICNs) are specific dynamic functional brain networks that are consistently found under various conditions including rest and task. Studies have shown that some stimuli actually activate intrinsic connectivity through either suppression, excitation, moderation or modification. Nevertheless, the structure of ICNs and task-related effects on ICNs are not yet fully understood. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian Intrinsic Connectivity Network (BICNet) model to identify the ICNs and quantify the task-related effects on the ICN dynamics. Using an extended Bayesian dynamic sparse latent factor model, the proposed BICNet has the following advantages: (1) it simultaneously identifies the individual ICNs and group-level ICN spatial maps; (2) it robustly identifies ICNs by jointly modeling resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rfMRI) and task-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (tfMRI); (3) compared to independent component analysis (ICA)-based methods, it can quantify the difference of ICNs amplitudes across different states; (4) it automatically performs feature selection through the sparsity of the ICNs rather than ad-hoc thresholding. The proposed BICNet was applied to the rfMRI and language tfMRI data from the Human Connectome Project (HCP) and the analysis identified several ICNs related to distinct language processing functions.

stat.AP↗

Multivariate Conway-Maxwell-Poisson Distribution: Sarmanov Method and Doubly-Intractable Bayesian Inference

In this paper, a multivariate count distribution with Conway-Maxwell (COM)-Poisson marginals is proposed. To do this, we develop a modification of the Sarmanov method for constructing multivariate distributions. Our multivariate COM-Poisson (MultCOMP) model has desirable features such as (i) it admits a flexible covariance matrix allowing for both negative and positive non-diagonal entries; (ii) it overcomes the limitation of the existing bivariate COM-Poisson distributions in the literature that do not have COM-Poisson marginals; (iii) it allows for the analysis of multivariate counts and is not just limited to bivariate counts. Inferential challenges are presented by the likelihood specification as it depends on a number of intractable normalizing constants involving the model parameters. These obstacles motivate us to propose a Bayesian inferential approach where the resulting doubly-intractable posterior is dealt with via the exchange algorithm and the Grouped Independence Metropolis-Hastings algorithm. Numerical experiments based on simulations are presented to illustrate the proposed Bayesian approach. We analyze the potential of the MultCOMP model through a real data application on the numbers of goals scored by the home and away teams in the Premier League from 2018 to 2021. Here, our interest is to assess the effect of a lack of crowds during the COVID-19 pandemic on the well-known home team advantage. A MultCOMP model fit shows that there is evidence of a decreased number of goals scored by the home team, not accompanied by a reduced score from the opponent. Hence, our analysis suggests a smaller home team advantage in the absence of crowds, which agrees with the opinion of several football experts.

stat.ME↗

Markov-Switching State-Space Models with Applications to Neuroimaging

State-space models (SSM) with Markov switching offer a powerful framework for detecting multiple regimes in time series, analyzing mutual dependence and dynamics within regimes, and asserting transitions between regimes. These models however present considerable computational challenges due to the exponential number of possible regime sequences to account for. In addition, high dimensionality of time series can hinder likelihood-based inference. This paper proposes novel statistical methods for Markov-switching SSMs using maximum likelihood estimation, Expectation-Maximization (EM), and parametric bootstrap. We develop solutions for initializing the EM algorithm, accelerating convergence, and conducting inference that are ideally suited to massive spatio-temporal data such as brain signals. We evaluate these methods in simulations and present applications to EEG studies of epilepsy and of motor imagery. All proposed methods are implemented in a MATLAB toolbox available at https://github.com/ddegras/switch-ssm.

stat.ME↗

SCAU: Modeling spectral causality for multivariate time series with applications to electroencephalograms

Electroencephalograms (EEG) are noninvasive measurement signals of electrical neuronal activity in the brain. One of the current major statistical challenges is formally measuring functional dependency between those complex signals. This paper, proposes the spectral causality model (SCAU), a robust linear model, under a causality paradigm, to reflect inter- and intra-frequency modulation effects that cannot be identifiable using other methods. SCAU inference is conducted with three main steps: (a) signal decomposition into frequency bins, (b) intermediate spectral band mapping, and (c) dependency modeling through frequency-specific autoregressive models (VAR). We apply SCAU to study complex dependencies during visual and lexical fluency tasks (word generation and visual fixation) in 26 participants' EEGs. We compared the connectivity networks estimated using SCAU with respect to a VAR model. SCAU networks show a clear contrast for both stimuli while the magnitude links also denoted a low variance in comparison with the VAR networks. Furthermore, SCAU dependency connections not only were consistent with findings in the neuroscience literature, but it also provided further evidence on the directionality of the spatio-spectral dependencies such as the delta-originated and theta-induced links in the fronto-temporal brain network.

stat.ME↗

Spectral Dependence

This paper presents a general framework for modeling dependence in multivariate time series. Its fundamental approach relies on decomposing each signal in a system into various frequency components and then studying the dependence properties through these oscillatory activities.The unifying theme across the paper is to explore the strength of dependence and possible lead-lag dynamics through filtering. The proposed framework is capable of representing both linear and non-linear dependencies that could occur instantaneously or after some delay(lagged dependence). Examples for studying dependence between oscillations are illustrated through multichannel electroencephalograms. These examples emphasized that some of the most prominent frequency domain measures such as coherence, partial coherence,and dual-frequency coherence can be derived as special cases under this general framework.This paper also introduces related approaches for modeling dependence through phase-amplitude coupling and causality of (one-sided) filtered signals.

stat.ME↗

Brain Waves Analysis Via a Non-parametric Bayesian Mixture of Autoregressive Kernels

The standard approach to analyzing brain electrical activity is to examine the spectral density function (SDF) and identify predefined frequency bands that have the most substantial relative contributions to the overall variance of the signal. However, a limitation of this approach is that the precise frequency and bandwidth of oscillations vary with cognitive demands. Thus they should not be arbitrarily defined a priori in an experiment. In this paper, we develop a data-driven approach that identifies (i) the number of prominent peaks, (ii) the frequency peak locations, and (iii) their corresponding bandwidths (or spread of power around the peaks). We propose a Bayesian mixture auto-regressive decomposition method (BMARD), which represents the standardized SDFas a Dirichlet process mixture based on a kernel derived from second-order auto-regressive processes which completely characterize the location (peak)and scale (bandwidth) parameters. We present a Metropolis-Hastings within Gibbs algorithm to sample from the posterior distribution of the mixture parameters. Simulation studies demonstrate the robustness and performance of the BMARD method. Finally, we use the proposed BMARD method to analyze local field potential (LFP) activity from the hippocampus of laboratory rats across different conditions in a non-spatial sequence memory experiment to identify the most interesting frequency bands and examine the link between specific patterns of activity and trial-specific cognitive demands.

stat.ME↗

Ridge-penalized adaptive Mantel test and its application in imaging genetics

We propose a ridge-penalized adaptive Mantel test (AdaMant) for evaluating the association of two high-dimensional sets of features. By introducing a ridge penalty, AdaMant tests the association across many metrics simultaneously. We demonstrate how ridge penalization bridges Euclidean and Mahalanobis distances and their corresponding linear models from the perspective of association measurement and testing. This result is not only theoretically interesting but also has important implications in penalized hypothesis testing, especially in high dimensional settings such as imaging genetics. Applying the proposed method to an imaging genetic study of visual working memory in health adults, we identified interesting associations of brain connectivity (measured by EEG coherence) with selected genetic features.

stat.ME↗

Time-varying $\ell_0$ optimization for Spike Inference from Multi-Trial Calcium Recordings

Optical imaging of genetically encoded calcium indicators is a powerful tool to record the activity of a large number of neurons simultaneously over a long period of time from freely behaving animals. However, determining the exact time at which a neuron spikes and estimating the underlying firing rate from calcium fluorescence data remains challenging, especially for calcium imaging data obtained from a longitudinal study. We propose a multi-trial time-varying $\ell_0$ penalized method to jointly detect spikes and estimate firing rates by robustly integrating evolving neural dynamics across trials. Our simulation study shows that the proposed method performs well in both spike detection and firing rate estimation. We demonstrate the usefulness of our method on calcium fluorescence trace data from two studies, with the first study showing differential firing rate functions between two behaviors and the second study showing evolving firing rate function across trials due to learning.

stat.AP↗

Separating Stimulus-Induced and Background Components of Dynamic Functional Connectivity in Naturalistic fMRI

We consider the challenges in extracting stimulus-related neural dynamics from other intrinsic processes and noise in naturalistic functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Most studies rely on inter-subject correlations (ISC) of low-level regional activity and neglect varying responses in individuals. We propose a novel, data-driven approach based on low-rank plus sparse (L+S) decomposition to isolate stimulus-driven dynamic changes in brain functional connectivity (FC) from the background noise, by exploiting shared network structure among subjects receiving the same naturalistic stimuli. The time-resolved multi-subject FC matrices are modeled as a sum of a low-rank component of correlated FC patterns across subjects, and a sparse component of subject-specific, idiosyncratic background activities. To recover the shared low-rank subspace, we introduce a fused version of principal component pursuit (PCP) by adding a fusion-type penalty on the differences between the rows of the low-rank matrix. The method improves the detection of stimulus-induced group-level homogeneity in the FC profile while capturing inter-subject variability. We develop an efficient algorithm via a linearized alternating direction method of multipliers to solve the fused-PCP. Simulations show accurate recovery by the fused-PCP even when a large fraction of FC edges are severely corrupted. When applied to natural fMRI data, our method reveals FC changes that were time-locked to auditory processing during movie watching, with dynamic engagement of sensorimotor systems for speech-in-noise. It also provides a better mapping to auditory content in the movie than ISC.

q-bio.NC↗

Change-point detection using spectral PCA for multivariate time series

We propose a two-stage approach Spec PC-CP to identify change points in multivariate time series. In the first stage, we obtain a low-dimensional summary of the high-dimensional time series by Spectral Principal Component Analysis (Spec-PCA). In the second stage, we apply cumulative sum-type test on the Spectral PCA component using a binary segmentation algorithm. Compared with existing approaches, the proposed method is able to capture the lead-lag relationship in time series. Our simulations demonstrate that the Spec PC-CP method performs significantly better than competing methods for detecting change points in high-dimensional time series. The results on epileptic seizure EEG data and stock data also indicate that our new method can efficiently {detect} change points corresponding to the onset of the underlying events.

stat.AP↗

Conex-Connect: Learning Patterns in Extremal Brain Connectivity From Multi-Channel EEG Data

Epilepsy is a chronic neurological disorder affecting more than 50 million people globally. An epileptic seizure acts like a temporary shock to the neuronal system, disrupting normal electrical activity in the brain. Epilepsy is frequently diagnosed with electroencephalograms (EEGs). Current methods study the time-varying spectra and coherence but do not directly model changes in extreme behavior. Thus, we propose a new approach to characterize brain connectivity based on the joint tail behavior of the EEGs. Our proposed method, the conditional extremal dependence for brain connectivity (Conex-Connect), is a pioneering approach that links the association between extreme values of higher oscillations at a reference channel with the other brain network channels. Using the Conex-Connect method, we discover changes in the extremal dependence driven by the activity at the foci of the epileptic seizure. Our model-based approach reveals that, pre-seizure, the dependence is notably stable for all channels when conditioning on extreme values of the focal seizure area. Post-seizure, by contrast, the dependence between channels is weaker, and dependence patterns are more "chaotic". Moreover, in terms of spectral decomposition, we find that high values of the high-frequency Gamma-band are the most relevant features to explain the conditional extremal dependence of brain connectivity.

q-bio.NC↗

Flexible Bivariate INGARCH Process With a Broad Range of Contemporaneous Correlation

We propose a novel flexible bivariate conditional Poisson (BCP) INteger-valued Generalized AutoRegressive Conditional Heteroscedastic (INGARCH) model for correlated count time series data. Our proposed BCP-INGARCH model is mathematically tractable and has as the main advantage over existing bivariate INGARCH models its ability to capture a broad range (both negative and positive) of contemporaneous cross-correlation which is a non-trivial advancement. Properties of stationarity and ergodicity for the BCP-INGARCH process are developed. Estimation of the parameters is performed through conditional maximum likelihood (CML) and finite sample behavior of the estimators are investigated through simulation studies. Asymptotic properties of the CML estimators are derived. Additional simulation studies compare and contrast methods of obtaining standard errors of the parameter estimates, where a bootstrap option is demonstrated to be advantageous. Hypothesis testing methods for the presence of contemporaneous correlation between the time series are presented and evaluated. We apply our methodology to monthly counts of hepatitis cases at two nearby Brazilian cities, which are highly cross-correlated. The data analysis demonstrates the importance of considering a bivariate model allowing for a wide range of contemporaneous correlation in real-life applications.

stat.ME↗

Structural Brain Asymmetries in Youths with Combined and Inattentive Presentations of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

Alterations in structural brain laterality are reported in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). However, few studies examined differences within presentations of ADHD. We investigate asymmetry index (AI) across 13 subcortical and 33 cortical regions from anatomical metrics of volume, surface area, and thickness. Structural T1-weighted MRI data were obtained from youths with inattentive (n = 64) and combined (n = 51) presentations, and aged-matched controls (n = 298). We used a linear mixed effect model that accounts for data site heterogeneity, while studying associations between AI and covariates of presentation and age. Our paper contributes to the functional results seen among ADHD presentations evidencing disrupted connectivity in motor networks from ADHD-C and cingulo-frontal networks from ADHD-I, as well as new findings in the temporal cortex and default mode subnetworks. Age patterns of structural asymmetries vary with presentation type. Linear mixed effects model is a practical tool for characterizing associations between brain asymmetries, diagnosis, and neurodevelopment.

q-bio.NC↗