Jimin Ding | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

On prediction-powered inference for quantile regression via convolution smoothing

This paper studies quantile regression in a data-limited setting where the gold-standard outcome is available only for a limited number of observations, whereas a surrogate outcome is widely available. Such settings are becoming increasingly common with the availability of low-cost predictions from modern AI, motivating a growing line of research on "prediction-powered inference," for improved statistical inference. Naively extending this framework to quantile regression, however, raises two challenges: computational difficulties due to the discontinuity of the subgradient, and overly conservative confidence intervals. To address these issues, we propose a convolution-based smoothing of the check-loss objective and develop two variants of the estimator. The proposed estimators are computationally tractable, and our numerical studies show that they mitigate overcoverage. As a theoretical contribution, we establish the asymptotic distributions of the proposed estimators under a possibly misspecified linear quantile regression model. We further propose an ensemble of the two estimators and illustrate the proposed methods through simulations and an application to a local housing dataset.

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arXiv2025

Enhanced Survival Trees

We introduce a new survival tree method for censored failure time data that incorporates three key advancements over traditional approaches. First, we develop a more computationally efficient splitting procedure that effectively mitigates the end-cut preference problem, and we propose an intersected validation strategy to reduce the variable selection bias inherent in greedy searches. Second, we present a novel framework for determining tree structures through fused regularization. In combination with conventional pruning, this approach enables the merging of non-adjacent terminal nodes, producing more parsimonious and interpretable models. Third, we address inference by constructing valid confidence intervals for median survival times within the subgroups identified by the final tree. To achieve this, we apply bootstrap-based bias correction to standard errors. The proposed method is assessed through extensive simulation studies and illustrated with data from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) study.

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