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Jianqing Fan

Publications and source records attributed to Jianqing Fan.

At least 163 records · Page 9Linked to original sources
arXiv2015

Asymptotics of Empirical Eigen-structure for Ultra-high Dimensional Spiked Covariance Model

We derive the asymptotic distributions of the spiked eigenvalues and eigenvectors under a generalized and unified asymptotic regime, which takes into account the spike magnitude of leading eigenvalues, sample size, and dimensionality. This new regime allows high dimensionality and diverging eigenvalue spikes and provides new insights into the roles the leading eigenvalues, sample size, and dimensionality play in principal component analysis. The results are proven by a technical device, which swaps the role of rows and columns and converts the high-dimensional problems into low-dimensional ones. Our results are a natural extension of those in Paul (2007) to more general setting with new insights and solve the rates of convergence problems in Shen et al. (2013). They also reveal the biases of the estimation of leading eigenvalues and eigenvectors by using principal component analysis, and lead to a new covariance estimator for the approximate factor model, called shrinkage principal orthogonal complement thresholding (S-POET), that corrects the biases. Our results are successfully applied to outstanding problems in estimation of risks of large portfolios and false discovery proportions for dependent test statistics and are illustrated by simulation studies.

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arXiv2015

Large Covariance Estimation through Elliptical Factor Models

We proposed a general Principal Orthogonal complEment Thresholding (POET) framework for large-scale covariance matrix estimation based on an approximate factor model. A set of high level sufficient conditions for the procedure to achieve optimal rates of convergence under different matrix norms were brought up to better understand how POET works. Such a framework allows us to recover the results for sub-Gaussian in a more transparent way that only depends on the concentration properties of the sample covariance matrix. As a new theoretical contribution, for the first time, such a framework allows us to exploit conditional sparsity covariance structure for the heavy-tailed data. In particular, for the elliptical data, we proposed a robust estimator based on marginal and multivariate Kendall's tau to satisfy these conditions. In addition, conditional graphical model was also studied under the same framework. The technical tools developed in this paper are of general interest to high dimensional principal component analysis. Thorough numerical results were also provided to back up the developed theory.

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arXiv2015

QUADRO: A supervised dimension reduction method via Rayleigh quotient optimization

We propose a novel Rayleigh quotient based sparse quadratic dimension reduction method - named QUADRO (Quadratic Dimension Reduction via Rayleigh Optimization) - for analyzing high- dimensional data. Unlike in the linear setting where Rayleigh quotient optimization coincides with classification, these two problems are very different under nonlinear settings. In this paper, we clarify this difference and show that Rayleigh quotient optimization may be of independent scientific interests. One major challenge of Rayleigh quotient optimization is that the variance of quadratic statistics involves all fourth cross-moments of predictors, which are infeasible to compute for high-dimensional applications and may accumulate too many stochastic errors. This issue is resolved by considering a family of elliptical models. Moreover, for heavy-tail distributions, robust estimates of mean vectors and covariance matrices are employed to guarantee uniform convergence in estimating nonpolynomially many parameters, even though only the fourth moments are assumed. Methodologically, QUADRO is based on elliptical models which allow us to formulate the Rayleigh quotient maximization as a convex optimization problem. Computationally, we propose an efficient linearized augmented Lagrangian method to solve the constrained optimization problem. Theoretically, we provide explicit rates of convergence in terms of Rayleigh quotient under both Gaussian and general elliptical models. Thorough numerical results on both synthetic and real datasets are also provided to back up our theoretical results.

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arXiv2015

An Overview on the Estimation of Large Covariance and Precision Matrices

Estimating large covariance and precision matrices are fundamental in modern multivariate analysis. The problems arise from statistical analysis of large panel economics and finance data. The covariance matrix reveals marginal correlations between variables, while the precision matrix encodes conditional correlations between pairs of variables given the remaining variables. In this paper, we provide a selective review of several recent developments on estimating large covariance and precision matrices. We focus on two general approaches: rank based method and factor model based method. Theories and applications of both approaches are presented. These methods are expected to be widely applicable to analysis of economic and financial data.

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arXiv2015

Strong oracle optimality of folded concave penalized estimation

Folded concave penalization methods have been shown to enjoy the strong oracle property for high-dimensional sparse estimation. However, a folded concave penalization problem usually has multiple local solutions and the oracle property is established only for one of the unknown local solutions. A challenging fundamental issue still remains that it is not clear whether the local optimum computed by a given optimization algorithm possesses those nice theoretical properties. To close this important theoretical gap in over a decade, we provide a unified theory to show explicitly how to obtain the oracle solution via the local linear approximation algorithm. For a folded concave penalized estimation problem, we show that as long as the problem is localizable and the oracle estimator is well behaved, we can obtain the oracle estimator by using the one-step local linear approximation. In addition, once the oracle estimator is obtained, the local linear approximation algorithm converges, namely it produces the same estimator in the next iteration. The general theory is demonstrated by using four classical sparse estimation problems, that is, sparse linear regression, sparse logistic regression, sparse precision matrix estimation and sparse quantile regression.

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arXiv2015

Robust Inference of Risks of Large Portfolios

We propose a bootstrap-based robust high-confidence level upper bound (Robust H-CLUB) for assessing the risks of large portfolios. The proposed approach exploits rank-based and quantile-based estimators, and can be viewed as a robust extension of the H-CLUB method (Fan et al., 2015). Such an extension allows us to handle possibly misspecified models and heavy-tailed data. Under mixing conditions, we analyze the proposed approach and demonstrate its advantage over the H-CLUB. We further provide thorough numerical results to back up the developed theory. We also apply the proposed method to analyze a stock market dataset.

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arXiv2015

Feature Augmentation via Nonparametrics and Selection (FANS) in High Dimensional Classification

We propose a high dimensional classification method that involves nonparametric feature augmentation. Knowing that marginal density ratios are the most powerful univariate classifiers, we use the ratio estimates to transform the original feature measurements. Subsequently, penalized logistic regression is invoked, taking as input the newly transformed or augmented features. This procedure trains models equipped with local complexity and global simplicity, thereby avoiding the curse of dimensionality while creating a flexible nonlinear decision boundary. The resulting method is called Feature Augmentation via Nonparametrics and Selection (FANS). We motivate FANS by generalizing the Naive Bayes model, writing the log ratio of joint densities as a linear combination of those of marginal densities. It is related to generalized additive models, but has better interpretability and computability. Risk bounds are developed for FANS. In numerical analysis, FANS is compared with competing methods, so as to provide a guideline on its best application domain. Real data analysis demonstrates that FANS performs very competitively on benchmark email spam and gene expression data sets. Moreover, FANS is implemented by an extremely fast algorithm through parallel computing.

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arXiv2014

Challenges of Big Data Analysis

Big Data bring new opportunities to modern society and challenges to data scientists. On one hand, Big Data hold great promises for discovering subtle population patterns and heterogeneities that are not possible with small-scale data. On the other hand, the massive sample size and high dimensionality of Big Data introduce unique computational and statistical challenges, including scalability and storage bottleneck, noise accumulation, spurious correlation, incidental endogeneity, and measurement errors. These challenges are distinguished and require new computational and statistical paradigm. This article give overviews on the salient features of Big Data and how these features impact on paradigm change on statistical and computational methods as well as computing architectures. We also provide various new perspectives on the Big Data analysis and computation. In particular, we emphasis on the viability of the sparsest solution in high-confidence set and point out that exogeneous assumptions in most statistical methods for Big Data can not be validated due to incidental endogeneity. They can lead to wrong statistical inferences and consequently wrong scientific conclusions.

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arXiv2014

Covariate assisted screening and estimation

Consider a linear model $Y=Xβ+z$, where $X=X_{n,p}$ and $z\sim N(0,I_n)$. The vector $β$ is unknown but is sparse in the sense that most of its coordinates are $0$. The main interest is to separate its nonzero coordinates from the zero ones (i.e., variable selection). Motivated by examples in long-memory time series (Fan and Yao [Nonlinear Time Series: Nonparametric and Parametric Methods (2003) Springer]) and the change-point problem (Bhattacharya [In Change-Point Problems (South Hadley, MA, 1992) (1994) 28-56 IMS]), we are primarily interested in the case where the Gram matrix $G=X'X$ is nonsparse but sparsifiable by a finite order linear filter. We focus on the regime where signals are both rare and weak so that successful variable selection is very challenging but is still possible. We approach this problem by a new procedure called the covariate assisted screening and estimation (CASE). CASE first uses a linear filtering to reduce the original setting to a new regression model where the corresponding Gram (covariance) matrix is sparse. The new covariance matrix induces a sparse graph, which guides us to conduct multivariate screening without visiting all the submodels. By interacting with the signal sparsity, the graph enables us to decompose the original problem into many separated small-size subproblems (if only we know where they are!). Linear filtering also induces a so-called problem of information leakage, which can be overcome by the newly introduced patching technique. Together, these give rise to CASE, which is a two-stage screen and clean [Fan and Song Ann. Statist. 38 (2010) 3567-3604; Wasserman and Roeder Ann. Statist. 37 (2009) 2178-2201] procedure, where we first identify candidates of these submodels by patching and screening, and then re-examine each candidate to remove false positives.

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arXiv2014

Robust Estimation of High-Dimensional Mean Regression

Data subject to heavy-tailed errors are commonly encountered in various scientific fields, especially in the modern era with explosion of massive data. To address this problem, procedures based on quantile regression and Least Absolute Deviation (LAD) regression have been devel- oped in recent years. These methods essentially estimate the conditional median (or quantile) function. They can be very different from the conditional mean functions when distributions are asymmetric and heteroscedastic. How can we efficiently estimate the mean regression functions in ultra-high dimensional setting with existence of only the second moment? To solve this problem, we propose a penalized Huber loss with diverging parameter to reduce biases created by the traditional Huber loss. Such a penalized robust approximate quadratic (RA-quadratic) loss will be called RA-Lasso. In the ultra-high dimensional setting, where the dimensionality can grow exponentially with the sample size, our results reveal that the RA-lasso estimator produces a consistent estimator at the same rate as the optimal rate under the light-tail situation. We further study the computational convergence of RA-Lasso and show that the composite gradient descent algorithm indeed produces a solution that admits the same optimal rate after sufficient iterations. As a byproduct, we also establish the concentration inequality for estimat- ing population mean when there exists only the second moment. We compare RA-Lasso with other regularized robust estimators based on quantile regression and LAD regression. Extensive simulation studies demonstrate the satisfactory finite-sample performance of RA-Lasso.

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arXiv2014

Power Enhancement in High Dimensional Cross-Sectional Tests

We propose a novel technique to boost the power of testing a high-dimensional vector $H:\btheta=0$ against sparse alternatives where the null hypothesis is violated only by a couple of components. Existing tests based on quadratic forms such as the Wald statistic often suffer from low powers due to the accumulation of errors in estimating high-dimensional parameters. More powerful tests for sparse alternatives such as thresholding and extreme-value tests, on the other hand, require either stringent conditions or bootstrap to derive the null distribution and often suffer from size distortions due to the slow convergence. Based on a screening technique, we introduce a "power enhancement component", which is zero under the null hypothesis with high probability, but diverges quickly under sparse alternatives. The proposed test statistic combines the power enhancement component with an asymptotically pivotal statistic, and strengthens the power under sparse alternatives. The null distribution does not require stringent regularity conditions, and is completely determined by that of the pivotal statistic. As a byproduct, the power enhancement component also consistently identifies the elements that violate the null hypothesis. As specific applications, the proposed methods are applied to testing the factor pricing models and validating the cross-sectional independence in panel data models.

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arXiv2014

Sparsifying the Fisher Linear Discriminant by Rotation

Many high dimensional classification techniques have been proposed in the literature based on sparse linear discriminant analysis (LDA). To efficiently use them, sparsity of linear classifiers is a prerequisite. However, this might not be readily available in many applications, and rotations of data are required to create the needed sparsity. In this paper, we propose a family of rotations to create the required sparsity. The basic idea is to use the principal components of the sample covariance matrix of the pooled samples and its variants to rotate the data first and to then apply an existing high dimensional classifier. This rotate-and-solve procedure can be combined with any existing classifiers, and is robust against the sparsity level of the true model. We show that these rotations do create the sparsity needed for high dimensional classifications and provide theoretical understanding why such a rotation works empirically. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by a number of simulated and real data examples, and the improvements of our method over some popular high dimensional classification rules are clearly shown.

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arXiv2014

Endogeneity in high dimensions

Most papers on high-dimensional statistics are based on the assumption that none of the regressors are correlated with the regression error, namely, they are exogenous. Yet, endogeneity can arise incidentally from a large pool of regressors in a high-dimensional regression. This causes the inconsistency of the penalized least-squares method and possible false scientific discoveries. A necessary condition for model selection consistency of a general class of penalized regression methods is given, which allows us to prove formally the inconsistency claim. To cope with the incidental endogeneity, we construct a novel penalized focused generalized method of moments (FGMM) criterion function. The FGMM effectively achieves the dimension reduction and applies the instrumental variable methods. We show that it possesses the oracle property even in the presence of endogenous predictors, and that the solution is also near global minimum under the over-identification assumption. Finally, we also show how the semi-parametric efficiency of estimation can be achieved via a two-step approach.

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arXiv2014

High Dimensional Semiparametric Latent Graphical Model for Mixed Data

Graphical models are commonly used tools for modeling multivariate random variables. While there exist many convenient multivariate distributions such as Gaussian distribution for continuous data, mixed data with the presence of discrete variables or a combination of both continuous and discrete variables poses new challenges in statistical modeling. In this paper, we propose a semiparametric model named latent Gaussian copula model for binary and mixed data. The observed binary data are assumed to be obtained by dichotomizing a latent variable satisfying the Gaussian copula distribution or the nonparanormal distribution. The latent Gaussian model with the assumption that the latent variables are multivariate Gaussian is a special case of the proposed model. A novel rank-based approach is proposed for both latent graph estimation and latent principal component analysis. Theoretically, the proposed methods achieve the same rates of convergence for both precision matrix estimation and eigenvector estimation, as if the latent variables were observed. Under similar conditions, the consistency of graph structure recovery and feature selection for leading eigenvectors is established. The performance of the proposed methods is numerically assessed through simulation studies, and the usage of our methods is illustrated by a genetic dataset.

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arXiv2014

Adaptive robust variable selection

Heavy-tailed high-dimensional data are commonly encountered in various scientific fields and pose great challenges to modern statistical analysis. A natural procedure to address this problem is to use penalized quantile regression with weighted $L_1$-penalty, called weighted robust Lasso (WR-Lasso), in which weights are introduced to ameliorate the bias problem induced by the $L_1$-penalty. In the ultra-high dimensional setting, where the dimensionality can grow exponentially with the sample size, we investigate the model selection oracle property and establish the asymptotic normality of the WR-Lasso. We show that only mild conditions on the model error distribution are needed. Our theoretical results also reveal that adaptive choice of the weight vector is essential for the WR-Lasso to enjoy these nice asymptotic properties. To make the WR-Lasso practically feasible, we propose a two-step procedure, called adaptive robust Lasso (AR-Lasso), in which the weight vector in the second step is constructed based on the $L_1$-penalized quantile regression estimate from the first step. This two-step procedure is justified theoretically to possess the oracle property and the asymptotic normality. Numerical studies demonstrate the favorable finite-sample performance of the AR-Lasso.

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arXiv2013

Multiscale adaptive smoothing models for the hemodynamic response function in fMRI

In the event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data analysis, there is an extensive interest in accurately and robustly estimating the hemodynamic response function (HRF) and its associated statistics (e.g., the magnitude and duration of the activation). Most methods to date are developed in the time domain and they have utilized almost exclusively the temporal information of fMRI data without accounting for the spatial information. The aim of this paper is to develop a multiscale adaptive smoothing model (MASM) in the frequency domain by integrating the spatial and frequency information to adaptively and accurately estimate HRFs pertaining to each stimulus sequence across all voxels in a three-dimensional (3D) volume. We use two sets of simulation studies and a real data set to examine the finite sample performance of MASM in estimating HRFs. Our real and simulated data analyses confirm that MASM outperforms several other state-of-the-art methods, such as the smooth finite impulse response (sFIR) model.

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arXiv2013

Spatially Varying Coefficient Model for Neuroimaging Data with Jump Discontinuities

Motivated by recent work on studying massive imaging data in various neuroimaging studies, we propose a novel spatially varying coefficient model (SVCM) to spatially model the varying association between imaging measures in a three-dimensional (3D) volume (or 2D surface) with a set of covariates. Two key features of most neuorimaging data are the presence of multiple piecewise smooth regions with unknown edges and jumps and substantial spatial correlations. To specifically account for these two features, SVCM includes a measurement model with multiple varying coefficient functions, a jumping surface model for each varying coefficient function, and a functional principal component model. We develop a three-stage estimation procedure to simultaneously estimate the varying coefficient functions and the spatial correlations. The estimation procedure includes a fast multiscale adaptive estimation and testing procedure to independently estimate each varying coefficient function, while preserving its edges among different piecewise-smooth regions. We systematically investigate the asymptotic properties (e.g., consistency and asymptotic normality) of the multiscale adaptive parameter estimates. We also establish the uniform convergence rate of the estimated spatial covariance function and its associated eigenvalue and eigenfunctions. Our Monte Carlo simulation and real data analysis have confirmed the excellent performance of SVCM.

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