arXiv subjects

Klaus Nordhausen

Publications and source records attributed to Klaus Nordhausen.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

A critical comparison of handling zeros in high-dimensional compositional count data

The growing use of high-throughput sequencing (HTS) has enabled the large-scale production of compositional count data, driving progress in microbiome research. However, such count data are often high-dimensional, over-dispersed, and heavily zero-inflated, and they conflict with the continuity assumptions underlying log-ratio-based compositional data analysis (CoDA), creating substantial methodological challenges. This review provides an overview of zero-handling strategies in compositional data, covering zero-tolerant transformations, imputation approaches for rounded zeros, and statistical models for essential zeros. We specifically highlight the problems that arise when applying the log-ratio framework to sequencing-derived compositional count data, where violations of continuity can induce numerical instabilities and biased statistical inferences. Motivated by these issues, we systematically examine how existing imputation strategies behave when adapted to discrete, zero-inflated count data, including an evaluation of how the discrete, lattice-valued nature of the data affects imputation performance. Overall, this review consolidates scattered methodological developments, clarifies appropriate use cases, and identifies open challenges that motivate future zero-handling frameworks capable of jointly accommodating compositional constraints, zero inflation, and the lattice nature of count data, while also providing a detailed discussion of the comparison results.

stat.OT↗

arXiv2026

Stationary subspace analysis for spatial data

Stationary subspace analysis (SSA) is a blind source separation framework that decomposes linearly mixed multivariate data into stationary and nonstationary components. We extend SSA to spatially indexed data by introducing spatial stationary subspace analysis (spSSA), which explicitly accounts for spatial dependence. We propose three estimation procedures for the unmixing matrix based on first- and second-order spatial statistics. Each procedure targets a different type of nonstationarity and can be formulated as the solution to a generalized eigenvalue problem. To address situations where multiple forms of nonstationarity are present simultaneously, we combine the three procedures using approximate joint diagonalization. Simulation studies demonstrate that this combined approach yields superior separation performance. When the dimension of the nonstationary subspace is known, the proposed methods reliably recover the latent stationary and nonstationary components. However, determining this dimension remains a fundamental challenge in SSA, for which no generally accepted solution currently exists. Building on our estimation procedures, we propose a novel data augmentation approach to estimate the dimension of the nonstationary subspace and demonstrate its effectiveness through simulation studies. The proposed methodology is easily transferable to time series settings, making it of broader methodological interest.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2025

Time-aware UNet and super-resolution deep residual networks for spatial downscaling

Satellite data of atmospheric pollutants are often available only at coarse spatial resolution, limiting their applicability in local-scale environmental analysis and decision-making. Spatial downscaling methods aim to transform the coarse satellite data into high-resolution fields. In this work, two widely used deep learning architectures, the super-resolution deep residual network (SRDRN) and the encoder-decoder-based UNet, are considered for spatial downscaling of tropospheric ozone. Both methods are extended with a lightweight temporal module, which encodes observation time using either sinusoidal or radial basis function (RBF) encoding, and fuses the temporal features with the spatial representations in the networks. The proposed time-aware extensions are evaluated against their baseline counterparts in a case study on ozone downscaling over Italy. The results suggest that, while only slightly increasing computational complexity, the temporal modules significantly improve downscaling performance and convergence speed.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Independent vector analysis -- an introduction for statisticians

Blind source separation (BSS), particularly independent component analysis (ICA), has been widely used in various fields of science such as biomedical signal processing to recover latent source signals from the observed mixture. While ICA is typically applied to individual datasets, many real-world applications share underlying sources across datasets. Independent vector analysis (IVA) extends ICA to jointly analyze multiple datasets by exploiting statistical dependencies across them. While various IVA methods have been presented in signal processing literature, the statistical properties of methods remains largely unexplored. This article introduces the IVA model, numerous density models used in IVA, and various classical IVA methods to statistics community highlighting the need for further theoretical developments.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2025

Identifiable Autoregressive Variational Autoencoders for Nonlinear and Nonstationary Spatio-Temporal Blind Source Separation

The modeling and prediction of multivariate spatio-temporal data involve numerous challenges. Dimension reduction methods can significantly simplify this process, provided that they account for the complex dependencies between variables and across time and space. Nonlinear blind source separation has emerged as a promising approach, particularly following recent advances in identifiability results. Building on these developments, we introduce the identifiable autoregressive variational autoencoder, which ensures the identifiability of latent components consisting of nonstationary autoregressive processes. The blind source separation efficacy of the proposed method is showcased through a simulation study, where it is compared against state-of-the-art methods, and the spatio-temporal prediction performance is evaluated against several competitors on air pollution and weather datasets.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2025

Unsupervised linear discrimination using skewness

It is well-known that, in Gaussian two-group separation, the optimally discriminating projection direction can be estimated without any knowledge on the group labels. In this work, we \revision{gather} several such unsupervised estimators based on skewness and derive their limiting distributions. As one of our main results, we show that all affine equivariant estimators of the optimal direction have proportional asymptotic covariance matrices, making their comparison straightforward. Two of our four estimators are novel and two have been proposed already earlier. We use simulations to verify our results and to inspect the finite-sample behaviors of the estimators.

math.ST↗

arXiv2025

Invariant Coordinate Selection and Fisher discriminant subspace beyond the case of two groups

Invariant Coordinate Selection (ICS) is a multivariate technique that relies on the simultaneous diagonalization of two scatter matrices. It serves various purposes, including its use as a dimension reduction tool prior to clustering or outlier detection. ICS's theoretical foundation establishes why and when the identified subspace should contain relevant information by demonstrating its connection with the Fisher discriminant subspace (FDS). These general results have been examined in detail primarily for specific scatter combinations within a two-cluster framework. In this study, we expand these investigations to include more clusters and scatter combinations. Our analysis reveals the importance of distinguishing whether the group centers matrix has full rank. In the full-rank case, we establish deeper connections between ICS and FDS. We provide a detailed study of these relationships for three clusters when the group centers matrix has full rank and when it does not. Based on these expanded theoretical insights and supported by numerical studies, we conclude that ICS is indeed suitable for recovering the FDS under very general settings and cases of failure seem rare.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2024

Modelling multivariate spatio-temporal data with identifiable variational autoencoders

Modelling multivariate spatio-temporal data with complex dependency structures is a challenging task but can be simplified by assuming that the original variables are generated from independent latent components. If these components are found, they can be modelled univariately. Blind source separation aims to recover the latent components by estimating the unmixing transformation based on the observed data only. The current methods for spatio-temporal blind source separation are restricted to linear unmixing, and nonlinear variants have not been implemented. In this paper, we extend identifiable variational autoencoder to the nonlinear nonstationary spatio-temporal blind source separation setting and demonstrate its performance using comprehensive simulation studies. Additionally, we introduce two alternative methods for the latent dimension estimation, which is a crucial task in order to obtain the correct latent representation. Finally, we illustrate the proposed methods using a meteorological application, where we estimate the latent dimension and the latent components, interpret the components, and show how nonstationarity can be accounted and prediction accuracy can be improved by using the proposed nonlinear blind source separation method as a preprocessing method.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2024

Consistent Distribution Free Affine Invariant Tests for the Validity of Independent Component Models

We propose a family of tests of the validity of the assumptions underlying independent component analysis methods. The tests are formulated as L2-type procedures based on characteristic functions and involve weights; a proper choice of these weights and the estimation method for the mixing matrix yields consistent and affine-invariant tests. Due to the complexity of the asymptotic null distribution of the resulting test statistics, implementation is based on permutational and resampling strategies. This leads to distribution-free procedures regardless of whether these procedures are performed on the estimated independent components themselves or the componentwise ranks of their components. A Monte Carlo study involving various estimation methods for the mixing matrix, various weights, and a competing test based on distance covariance is conducted under the null hypothesis as well as under alternatives. A real-data application demonstrates the practical utility and effectiveness of the method.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2024

Tandem clustering with invariant coordinate selection

For multivariate data, tandem clustering is a well-known technique aiming to improve cluster identification through initial dimension reduction. Nevertheless, the usual approach using principal component analysis (PCA) has been criticized for focusing solely on inertia so that the first components do not necessarily retain the structure of interest for clustering. To address this limitation, a new tandem clustering approach based on invariant coordinate selection (ICS) is proposed. By jointly diagonalizing two scatter matrices, ICS is designed to find structure in the data while providing affine invariant components. Certain theoretical results have been previously derived and guarantee that under some elliptical mixture models, the group structure can be highlighted on a subset of the first and/or last components. However, ICS has garnered minimal attention within the context of clustering. Two challenges associated with ICS include choosing the pair of scatter matrices and selecting the components to retain. For effective clustering purposes, it is demonstrated that the best scatter pairs consist of one scatter matrix capturing the within-cluster structure and another capturing the global structure. For the former, local shape or pairwise scatters are of great interest, as is the minimum covariance determinant (MCD) estimator based on a carefully chosen subset size that is smaller than usual. The performance of ICS as a dimension reduction method is evaluated in terms of preserving the cluster structure in the data. In an extensive simulation study and empirical applications with benchmark data sets, various combinations of scatter matrices as well as component selection criteria are compared in situations with and without outliers. Overall, the new approach of tandem clustering with ICS shows promising results and clearly outperforms the PCA-based approach.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2023

Nonlinear blind source separation exploiting spatial nonstationarity

In spatial blind source separation the observed multivariate random fields are assumed to be mixtures of latent spatially dependent random fields. The objective is to recover latent random fields by estimating the unmixing transformation. Currently, the algorithms for spatial blind source separation can only estimate linear unmixing transformations. Nonlinear blind source separation methods for spatial data are scarce. In this paper we extend an identifiable variational autoencoder that can estimate nonlinear unmixing transformations to spatially dependent data and demonstrate its performance for both stationary and nonstationary spatial data using simulations. In addition, we introduce scaled mean absolute Shapley additive explanations for interpreting the latent components through nonlinear mixing transformation. The spatial identifiable variational autoencoder is applied to a geochemical dataset to find the latent random fields, which are then interpreted by using the scaled mean absolute Shapley additive explanations. Finally, we illustrate how the proposed method can be used as a pre-processing method when making multivariate predictions.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2023

Data Type Agnostic Visual Sensitivity Analysis

Modern science and industry rely on computational models for simulation, prediction, and data analysis. Spatial blind source separation (SBSS) is a model used to analyze spatial data. Designed explicitly for spatial data analysis, it is superior to popular non-spatial methods, like PCA. However, a challenge to its practical use is setting two complex tuning parameters, which requires parameter space analysis. In this paper, we focus on sensitivity analysis (SA). SBSS parameters and outputs are spatial data, which makes SA difficult as few SA approaches in the literature assume such complex data on both sides of the model. Based on the requirements in our design study with statistics experts, we developed a visual analytics prototype for data type agnostic visual sensitivity analysis that fits SBSS and other contexts. The main advantage of our approach is that it requires only dissimilarity measures for parameter settings and outputs. We evaluated the prototype heuristically with visualization experts and through interviews with two SBSS experts. In addition, we show the transferability of our approach by applying it to microclimate simulations. Study participants could confirm suspected and known parameter-output relations, find surprising associations, and identify parameter subspaces to examine in the future. During our design study and evaluation, we identified challenging future research opportunities.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

The Asymptotic Properties of the One-Sample Spatial Rank Methods

For a set of $p$-variate data points $\boldsymbol y_1,\ldots,\boldsymbol y_n$, there are several versions of multivariate median and related multivariate sign test proposed and studied in the literature. In this paper we consider the asymptotic properties of the multivariate extension of the Hodges-Lehmann (HL) estimator, the spatial HL-estimator, and the related test statistic. The asymptotic behavior of the spatial HL-estimator and the related test statistic when $n$ tends to infinity are collected, reviewed, and proved, some for the first time though being used already for a longer time. We also derive the limiting behavior of the HL-estimator when both the sample size $n$ and the dimension $p$ tend to infinity.

math.ST↗

arXiv2023

Robust and Resistant Regularized Covariance Matrices

We introduce a class of regularized M-estimators of multivariate scatter and show, analogous to the popular spatial sign covariance matrix (SSCM), that they possess high breakdown points. We also show that the SSCM can be viewed as an extreme member of this class. Unlike the SSCM, this class of estimators takes into account the shape of the contours of the data cloud when down-weighing observations. We also propose a median based cross validation criterion for selecting the tuning parameter for this class of regularized M-estimators. This cross validation criterion helps assure the resulting tuned scatter estimator is a good fit to the data as well as having a high breakdown point. A motivation for this new median based criterion is that when it is optimized over all possible scatter parameters, rather than only over the tuned candidates, it results in a new high breakdown point affine equivariant multivariate scatter statistic.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2023

Approximating Symmetrized Estimators of Scatter via Balanced Incomplete U-Statistics

We derive limiting distributions of symmetrized estimators of scatter, where instead of all $n(n-1)/2$ pairs of the $n$ observations we only consider $nd$ suitably chosen pairs, $1 \le d < \lfloor n/2\rfloor$. It turns out that the resulting estimators are asymptotically equivalent to the original one whenever $d = d(n) \to \infty$ at arbitrarily slow speed. We also investigate the asymptotic properties for arbitrary fixed $d$. These considerations and numerical examples indicate that for practical purposes, moderate fixed values of $d$ between,say, $10$ and $20$ yield already estimators which are computationally feasible and rather close to the original ones.

math.ST↗

arXiv2022

Large-Sample Properties of Non-Stationary Source Separation for Gaussian Signals

Non-stationary source separation is a well-established branch of blind source separation with many different methods. However, for none of these methods large-sample results are available. To bridge this gap, we develop large-sample theory for NSS-JD, a popular method of non-stationary source separation based on the joint diagonalization of block-wise covariance matrices. We work under an instantaneous linear mixing model for independent Gaussian non-stationary source signals together with a very general set of assumptions: besides boundedness conditions, the only assumptions we make are that the sources exhibit finite dependency and that their variance functions differ sufficiently to be asymptotically separable. The consistency of the unmixing estimator and its convergence to a limiting Gaussian distribution at the standard square root rate are shown to hold under the previous conditions. Simulation experiments are used to verify the theoretical results and to study the impact of block length on the separation.

math.ST↗

arXiv2022

Order Determination for Tensor-valued Observations Using Data Augmentation

Tensor-valued data benefits greatly from dimension reduction as the reduction in size is exponential in the number of modes. To achieve maximal reduction without loss in information, our objective in this work is to give an automated procedure for the optimal selection of the reduced dimensionality. Our approach combines a recently proposed data augmentation procedure with the higher-order singular value decomposition (HOSVD) in a tensorially natural way. We give theoretical guidelines on how to choose the tuning parameters and further inspect their influence in a simulation study. As our primary result, we show that the procedure consistently estimates the true latent dimensions under a noisy tensor model, both at the population and sample levels. Additionally, we propose a bootstrap-based alternative to the augmentation estimator. Simulations are used to demonstrate the estimation accuracy of the two methods under various settings.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2022

Numerical considerations and a new implementation for ICS

Invariant Coordinate Selection (ICS) is a multivariate data transformation and a dimension reduction method that can be useful in many different contexts. It can be used for outlier detection or cluster identification, and can be seen as an independent component or a non-Gaussian component analysis method. The usual implementation of ICS is based on a joint diagonalization of two scatter matrices, and may be numerically unstable in some ill-conditioned situations. We focus on one-step M-scatter matrices and propose a new implementation of ICS based on a pivoted QR factorization of the centered data set. This factorization avoids the direct computation of the scatter matrices and their inverse and brings numerical stability to the algorithm. Furthermore, the row and column pivoting leads to a rank revealing procedure that allows computation of ICS when the scatter matrices are not full rank. Several artificial and real data sets illustrate the interest of using the new implementation compared to the original one.

stat.CO↗