arXiv subjects

Holger Dette

Publications and source records attributed to Holger Dette.

At least 127 records · Page 7Linked to original sources

arXiv2018

A likelihood ratio approach to sequential change point detection for a general class of parameters

In this paper we propose a new approach for sequential monitoring of a parameter of a $d$-dimensional time series, which can be estimated by approximately linear functionals of the empirical distribution function. We consider a closed-end-method, which is motivated by the likelihood ratio test principle and compare the new method with two alternative procedures. We also incorporate self-normalization such that estimation of the long-run variance is not necessary. We prove that for a large class of testing problems the new detection scheme has asymptotic level $α$ and is consistent. The asymptotic theory is illustrated for the important cases of monitoring a change in the mean, variance and correlation. By means of a simulation study it is demonstrated that the new test performs better than the currently available procedures for these problems.Finally the methodology is illustrated by a small data example investigating index prices from the dot-com bubble.

math.ST↗

arXiv2018

Multiscale change point detection for dependent data

In this paper we study the theoretical properties of the simultaneous multiscale change point estimator (SMUCE) proposed by Frick et al. (2014) in regression models with dependent error processes. Empirical studies show that in this case the change point estimate is inconsistent, but it is not known if alternatives suggested in the literature for correlated data are consistent. We propose a modification of SMUCE scaling the basic statistic by the long run variance of the error process, which is estimated by a difference-type variance estimator calculated from local means from different blocks. For this modification we prove model consistency for physical dependent error processes and illustrate the finite sample performance by means of a simulation study.

math.ST↗

arXiv2018

Testing for Independence of Large Dimensional Vectors

In this paper new tests for the independence of two high-dimensional vectors are investigated. We consider the case where the dimension of the vectors increases with the sample size and propose multivariate analysis of variance-type statistics for the hypothesis of a block diagonal covariance matrix. The asymptotic properties of the new test statistics are investigated under the null hypothesis and the alternative hypothesis using random matrix theory. For this purpose we study the weak convergence of linear spectral statistics of central and (conditionally) non-central Fisher matrices. In particular, a central limit theorem for linear spectral statistics of large dimensional (conditionally) non-central Fisher matrices is derived which is then used to analyse the power of the tests under the alternative. The theoretical results are illustrated by means of a simulation study where we also compare the new tests with several alternative, in particular with the commonly used corrected likelihood ratio test. It is demonstrated that the latter test does not keep its nominal level, if the dimension of one sub-vector is relatively small compared to the dimension of the other sub-vector. On the other hand the tests proposed in this paper provide a reasonable approximation of the nominal level in such situations. Moreover, we observe that one of the proposed tests is most powerful under a variety of correlation scenarios.

math.ST↗

arXiv2018

Detecting deviations from second-order stationarity in locally stationary functional time series

A time-domain test for the assumption of second order stationarity of a functional time series is proposed. The test is based on combining individual cumulative sum tests which are designed to be sensitive to changes in the mean, variance and autocovariance operators, respectively. The combination of their dependent $p$-values relies on a joint dependent block multiplier bootstrap of the individual test statistics. Conditions under which the proposed combined testing procedure is asymptotically valid under stationarity are provided. A procedure is proposed to automatically choose the block length parameter needed for the construction of the bootstrap. The finite-sample behavior of the proposed test is investigated in Monte Carlo experiments and an illustration on a real data set is provided.

math.ST↗

arXiv2018

A nonparametric test for stationarity in functional time series

We propose a new measure for stationarity of a functional time series, which is based on an explicit representation of the $L^2$-distance between the spectral density operator of a non-stationary process and its best ($L^2$-)approximation by a spectral density operator corresponding to a stationary process. This distance can easily be estimated by sums of Hilbert-Schmidt inner products of periodogram operators (evaluated at different frequencies), and asymptotic normality of an appropriately standardized version of the estimator can be established for the corresponding estimate under the null hypothesis and alternative. As a result we obtain a simple asymptotic frequency domain level $α$ test (using the quantiles of the normal distribution) for the hypothesis of stationarity of functional time series. Other applications such as asymptotic confidence intervals for a measure of stationarity or the construction of tests for "relevant deviations from stationarity", are also briefly mentioned. We demonstrate in a small simulation study that the new method has very good finite sample properties. Moreover, we apply our test to annual temperature curves.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2018

Optimal designs for frequentist model averaging

We consider the problem of designing experiments for the estimation of a target in regression analysis if there is uncertainty about the parametric form of the regression function. A new optimality criterion is proposed, which minimizes the asymptotic mean squared error of the frequentist model averaging estimate by the choice of an experimental design. Necessary conditions for the optimal solution of a locally and Bayesian optimal design problem are established. The results are illustrated in several examples and it is demonstrated that Bayesian optimal designs can yield a reduction of the mean squared error of the model averaging estimator up to $45\%$.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2018

Random Moment Problems under Constraints

We investigate moment sequences of probability measures on $E\subset\mathbb{R}$ under constraints of certain moments being fixed. This corresponds to studying sections of $n$-th moment spaces, i.e. the spaces of moment sequences of order $n$. By equipping these sections with the uniform or more general probability distributions, we manage to give for large $n$ precise results on the (probabilistic) barycenters of moment space sections and the fluctuations of random moments around these barycenters. The measures associated to the barycenters belong to the Bernstein-Szegő class and show strong universal behavior. We prove Gaussian fluctuations and moderate and large deviations principles. Furthermore, we demonstrate how fixing moments by a constraint leads to breaking the connection between random moments and random matrices.

math.PR↗

arXiv2018

Regularization parameter selection in indirect regression by residual based bootstrap

Residual-based analysis is generally considered a cornerstone of statistical methodology. For a special case of indirect regression, we investigate the residual-based empirical distribution function and provide a uniform expansion of this estimator, which is also shown to be asymptotically most precise. This investigation naturally leads to a completely data-driven technique for selecting a regularization parameter used in our indirect regression function estimator. The resulting methodology is based on a smooth bootstrap of the model residuals. A simulation study demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2018

Change Point Analysis of Correlation in Non-stationary Time Series

A restrictive assumption in change point analysis is "stationarity under the null hypothesis of no change-point", which is crucial for asymptotic theory but not very realistic from a practical point of view. For example, if change point analysis for correlations is performed, it is not necessarily clear that the mean, marginal variance or higher order moments are constant, even if there is no change in the correlation. This paper develops change point analysis for the correlation structures under less restrictive assumptions. In contrast to previous work, our approach does not require that the mean, variance and fourth order joint cumulants are constant under the null hypothesis. Moreover, we also address the problem of detecting relevant change points.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2017

Functional data analysis in the Banach space of continuous functions

Functional data analysis is typically conducted within the $L^2$-Hilbert space framework. There is by now a fully developed statistical toolbox allowing for the principled application of the functional data machinery to real-world problems, often based on dimension reduction techniques such as functional principal component analysis. At the same time, there have recently been a number of publications that sidestep dimension reduction steps and focus on a fully functional $L^2$-methodology. This paper goes one step further and develops data analysis methodology for functional time series in the space of all continuous functions. The work is motivated by the fact that objects with rather different shapes may still have a small $L^2$-distance and are therefore identified as similar when using an $L^2$-metric. However, in applications it is often desirable to use metrics reflecting the visualization of the curves in the statistical analysis. The methodological contributions are focused on developing two-sample and change-point tests as well as confidence bands, as these procedures appear do be conducive to the proposed setting. Particular interest is put on relevant differences; that is, on not trying to test for exact equality, but rather for pre-specified deviations under the null hypothesis. The procedures are justified through large-sample theory. To ensure practicability, non-standard bootstrap procedures are developed and investigated addressing particular features that arise in the problem of testing relevant hypotheses. The finite sample properties are explored through a simulation study and an application to annual temperature profiles.

math.ST↗

arXiv2017

Optimal designs for regression with spherical data

In this paper optimal designs for regression problems with spherical predictors of arbitrary dimension are considered. Our work is motivated by applications in material sciences, where crystallographic textures such as the missorientation distribution or the grain boundary distribution (depending on a four dimensional spherical predictor) are represented by series of hyperspherical harmonics, which are estimated from experimental or simulated data. For this type of estimation problems we explicitly determine optimal designs with respect to Kiefers $Φ_p$-criteria and a class of orthogonally invariant information criteria recently introduced in the literature. In particular, we show that the uniform distribution on the $m$-dimensional sphere is optimal and construct discrete and implementable designs with the same information matrices as the continuous optimal designs. Finally, we illustrate the advantages of the new designs for series estimation by hyperspherical harmonics, which are symmetric with respect to the first and second crystallographic point group.

math.ST↗

arXiv2017

Risk Estimators for Choosing Regularization Parameters in Ill-Posed Problems - Properties and Limitations

This paper discusses the properties of certain risk estimators recently proposed to choose regularization parameters in ill-posed problems. A simple approach is Stein's unbiased risk estimator (SURE), which estimates the risk in the data space, while a recent modification (GSURE) estimates the risk in the space of the unknown variable. It seems intuitive that the latter is more appropriate for ill-posed problems, since the properties in the data space do not tell much about the quality of the reconstruction. We provide theoretical studies of both estimators for linear Tikhonov regularization in a finite dimensional setting and estimate the quality of the risk estimators, which also leads to asymptotic convergence results as the dimension of the problem tends to infinity. Unlike previous papers, who studied image processing problems with a very low degree of ill-posedness, we are interested in the behavior of the risk estimators for increasing ill-posedness. Interestingly, our theoretical results indicate that the quality of the GSURE risk can deteriorate asymptotically for ill-posed problems, which is confirmed by a detailed numerical study. The latter shows that in many cases the GSURE estimator leads to extremely small regularization parameters, which obviously cannot stabilize the reconstruction. Similar but less severe issues with respect to robustness also appear for the SURE estimator, which in comparison to the rather conservative discrepancy principle leads to the conclusion that regularization parameter choice based on unbiased risk estimation is not a reliable procedure for ill-posed problems. A similar numerical study for sparsity regularization demonstrates that the same issue appears in nonlinear variational regularization approaches.

math.ST↗

arXiv2017

Optimal designs for enzyme inhibition kinetic models

In this paper we present a new method for determining optimal designs for enzyme inhibition kinetic models, which are used to model the influence of the concentration of a substrate and an inhibition on the velocity of a reaction. The approach uses a nonlinear transformation of the vector of predictors such that the model in the new coordinates is given by an incomplete response surface model. Although there exist no explicit solutions of the optimal design problem for incomplete response surface models so far, the corresponding design problem in the new coordinates is substantially more transparent, such that explicit or numerical solutions can be determined more easily. The designs for the original problem can finally be found by an inverse transformation of the optimal designs determined for the response surface model. We illustrate the method determining explicit solutions for the $D$-optimal design and for the optimal design problem for estimating the individual coefficients in a non-competitive enzyme inhibition kinetic model.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2017

Assessing the similarity of dose response and target doses in two non-overlapping subgroups

We consider two problems that are attracting increasing attention in clinical dose finding studies. First, we assess the similarity of two non-linear regression models for two non-overlapping subgroups of patients over a restricted covariate space. To this end, we derive a confidence interval for the maximum difference between the two given models. If this confidence interval excludes the equivalence margins, similarity of dose response can be claimed. Second, we address the problem of demonstrating the similarity of two target doses for two non-overlapping subgroups, using again a confidence interval based approach. We illustrate the proposed methods with a real case study and investigate their operating characteristics (coverage probabilities, Type I error rates, power) via simulation.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2017

Universality in Random Moment Problems

Let $\mathcal{M}_n(E)$ denote the set of vectors of the first $n$ moments of probability measures on $E\subset\mathbb{R}$ with existing moments. The investigation of such moment spaces in high dimension has found considerable interest in the recent literature. For instance, it has been shown that a uniformly distributed moment sequence in $\mathcal M_n([0,1])$ converges in the large $n$ limit to the moment sequence of the arcsine distribution. In this article we provide a unifying viewpoint by identifying classes of more general distributions on $\mathcal{M}_n(E)$ for $E=[a,b],\,E=\mathbb{R}_+$ and $E=\mathbb{R}$, respectively, and discuss universality problems within these classes. In particular, we demonstrate that the moment sequence of the arcsine distribution is not universal for $E$ being a compact interval. On the other hand, on the moment spaces $\mathcal{M}_n(\mathbb{R}_+)$ and $\mathcal{M}_n(\mathbb{R})$ the random moment sequences governed by our distributions exhibit for $n\to\infty$ a universal behaviour: The first $k$ moments of such a random vector converge almost surely to the first $k$ moments of the Marchenko-Pastur distribution (half line) and Wigner's semi-circle distribution (real line). Moreover, the fluctuations around the limit sequences are Gaussian. We also obtain moderate and large deviations principles and discuss relations of our findings with free probability.

math.PR↗

arXiv2017

A simple test for white noise in functional time series

We propose a new procedure for white noise testing of a functional time series. Our approach is based on an explicit representation of the $L^2$-distance between the spectral density operator and its best ($L^2$-)approximation by a spectral density operator corresponding to a white noise process. The estimation of this distance can be easily accomplished by sums of periodogram kernels and it is shown that an appropriately standardized version of the estimator is asymptotically normal distributed under the null hypothesis (of functional white noise) and under the alternative. As a consequence we obtain a very simple test (using the quantiles of the normal distribution) for the hypothesis of a white noise functional process. In particular the test does neither require the estimation of a long run variance (including a fourth order cumulant) nor resampling procedures to calculate critical values. Moreover, in contrast to all other methods proposed in the literature our approach also allows to test for "relevant" deviations from white noise and to construct confidence intervals for a measure which measures the discrepancy of the underlying process from a functional white noise process.

math.ST↗

arXiv2017

Natural (non-)informative priors for skew-symmetric distributions

In this paper, we present an innovative method for constructing proper priors for the skewness (shape) parameter in the skew-symmetric family of distributions. The proposed method is based on assigning a prior distribution on the perturbation effect of the shape parameter, which is quantified in terms of the Total Variation distance. We discuss strategies to translate prior beliefs about the asymmetry of the data into an informative prior distribution of this class. We show via a Monte Carlo simulation study that our noninformative priors induce posterior distributions with good frequentist properties, similar to those of the Jeffreys prior. Our informative priors yield better results than their competitors from the literature. We also propose a scale- and location-invariant prior structure for models with unknown location and scale parameters and provide sufficient conditions for the propriety of the corresponding posterior distribution. Illustrative examples are presented using simulated and real data.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2017

Determinants of Random Block Hankel Matrices

We consider the moment space $\mathcal{M}^{p}_{2n+1}$ of moments up to the order $2n + 1$ of $p_n\times p_n$ real matrix measures defined on the interval $[0,1]$. The asymptotic properties of the Hankel determinant $\{\log\det (M_{i+j}^{p_n})_{i,j=0,\ldots,\lfloor nt\rfloor}\}_{t\in [0,1]}$ of a uniformly distributed vector $(M_1,\dots ,M_{2n+1})^t\sim\mathcal{U}(\mathcal{M}_{2n+1})$ are studied when the dimension $n$ of the moment space and the size of the matrices $p_n$ converge to infinity. In particular weak convergence of an appropriately centered and standardized version of this process is established. Mod-Gaussian convergence is shown and several large and moderate deviation principles are derived. Our results are based on some new relations between determinants of subblocks of the Jacobi-beta-ensemble,which are of their own interest and generalize Bartlett decomposition-type results for the Jacobi-beta-ensemble from the literature.

math.PR↗