arXiv subjects

Lionel Truquet

Publications and source records attributed to Lionel Truquet.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Functional dependence and synchronous coupling in ergodic autoregressions

Functional dependence measures have become an important tool in the analysis of nonlinear time series and are typically formulated with respect to a given innovation representation of the process. This note points out that the probability space on which such representations yield the expected memory loss properties may not always coincide with the natural dynamical probability space of the model. We exhibit classes of uniformly ergodic autoregressive processes for which the behavior of the natural innovation coupling undergoes a qualitative transition as the model parameter varies. For this family of models, this transition coincides with a change in the sign of an associated Lyapunov exponent. In particular, a positive Lyapunov exponent may prevent the forgetting of initial perturbations along trajectories driven by the same innovations, despite uniform ergodicity of the associated Markov chain. These observations highlight the importance of carefully specifying the underlying probability space when interpreting or applying functional dependence measures.

math.ST↗

arXiv2025

Sharp Mixing Rates for Markov Chains on General Spaces with Unbounded Random Environments

We consider Markov chains on general state spaces in stationary random environment which are defined by a random mapping that is contractive up to a bounded perturbation. We prove their convergence to a limiting law, providing convergence rates. We also show that these processes are strongly mixing and estimate their mixing coefficients. Our results significantly extend those available in the literature. In particular, for some additive autoregressive processes with exogenous covariates we achieve mixing rates that are optimal up to logarithmic factors.

math.PR↗

arXiv2025

Mixing properties of some Markov chains models in random environments

Markov chains in random environments (MCREs) have recently attracted renewed interest, as these processes naturally arise in many applications, such as econometrics and machine learning. Although specific asymptotic results, such as the law of the large numbers and central limit theorems, have been obtained for some of these models, their annealed dependence properties, such as strong mixing properties, are not well understood in general. We derive strong mixing properties for a wide range of MCREs that satisfy some drift/small set conditions, with general assumptions on the corresponding stochastic parameters and the mixing properties of the environments. We then demonstrate the wide range of applications of our results in time series analysis and stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics, with fewer restrictions than those found in existing literature.

math.PR↗

arXiv2025

Convergence rate for Nearest Neighbour matching: geometry of the domain and higher-order regularity

Estimating some mathematical expectations from partially observed data and in particular missing outcomes is a central problem encountered in numerous fields such as transfer learning, counterfactual analysis or causal inference. Matching estimators, estimators based on k-nearest neighbours, are widely used in this context. It is known that the variance of such estimators can converge to zero at a parametric rate, but their bias can have a slower rate when the dimension of the covariates is larger than 2. This makes analysis of this bias particularly important. In this paper, we provide higher order properties of the bias. In contrast to the existing literature related to this problem, we do not assume that the support of the target distribution of the covariates is strictly included in that of the source, and we analyse two geometric conditions on the support that avoid such boundary bias problems. We show that these conditions are much more general than the usual convex support assumption, leading to an improvement of existing results. Furthermore, we show that the matching estimator studied by Abadie and Imbens (2006) for the average treatment effect can be asymptotically efficient when the dimension of the covariates is less than 4, a result only known in dimension 1.

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arXiv2024

Mixing properties of nonstationary multivariate count processes

We prove absolute regularity ($β$-mixing) for nonstationary and multivariate versions of two popular classes of integer-valued processes. We show how this result can be used to prove asymptotic normality of a least squares estimator of an involved model parameter.

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arXiv2024

Inferring the parameters of Taylor's law in ecology

Taylor's power law (TL) or fluctuation scaling has been verified empirically for the abundances of many species, human and non-human, and in many other fields including physics, meteorology, computer science, and finance. TL asserts that the variance is directly proportional to a power of the mean, exactly for population moments and, whether or not population moments exist, approximately for sample moments. In many papers, linear regression of log variance as a function of log mean is used to estimate TL's parameters. We provide some statistical guarantees with large-sample asymptotics for this kind of inference under general conditions, and we derive confidence intervals for the parameters. In many ecological applications, the means and variances are estimated over time or across space from arrays of abundance data collected at different locations and time points. When the ratio between the time-series length and the number of spatial points converges to a constant as both become large, the usual normalized statistics are asymptotically biased. We provide a bias correction to get correct confidence intervals. TL, widely studied in multiple sciences, is a source of challenging new statistical problems in a nonstationary spatiotemporal framework. We illustrate our results with both simulated and real data sets.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2024

Time series on compact spaces, with an application to dynamic modeling of relative abundance data in Ecology

Motivated by the dynamic modeling of relative abundance data in ecology, we introduce a general approach to model stationary Markovian or non Markovian time series on (relatively) compact spaces such as a hypercube, the simplex or a sphere in the Euclidean space. Our approach is based on a general construction of infinite memory models, called chains with complete connections. The two main ingredients involved in our generic construction are a parametric family of probability distributions on the state space and a map from the state space to the parameter space. Our framework encompasses Markovian models, observation-driven models and more general infinite memory models. Simple conditions ensuring the existence and uniqueness of a stationary and ergodic path are given. We then study in more details statistical inference in two time series models on the simplex, based on either a Dirichlet or a multivariate logistic-normal conditional distribution. Usefulness of our models to analyze abundance data in ecosystems is also discussed.

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arXiv2024

Theory and inference for multivariate autoregressive binary models with an application to absence-presence data in ecology

We introduce a general class of autoregressive models for studying the dynamic of multivariate binary time series with stationary exogenous covariates. Using a high-level set of assumptions, we show that existence of a stationary path for such models is almost automatic and does not require parameter restrictions when the noise term is not compactly supported. We then study in details statistical inference in a dynamic version of a multivariate probit type model, as a particular case of our general construction. To avoid a complex likelihood optimization, we combine pseudo-likelihood and pairwise likelihood methods for which asymptotic results are obtained for a single path analysis and also for panel data, using ergodic theorems for multi-indexed partial sums. The latter scenario is particularly important for analyzing absence-presence of species in Ecology, a field where data are often collected from surveys at various locations. Our results also give a theoretical background for such models which are often used by the practitioners but without a probabilistic framework.

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arXiv2024

Nearest Neighbor Sampling for Covariate Shift Adaptation

Many existing covariate shift adaptation methods estimate sample weights given to loss values to mitigate the gap between the source and the target distribution. However, estimating the optimal weights typically involves computationally expensive matrix inversion and hyper-parameter tuning. In this paper, we propose a new covariate shift adaptation method which avoids estimating the weights. The basic idea is to directly work on unlabeled target data, labeled according to the $k$-nearest neighbors in the source dataset. Our analysis reveals that setting $k = 1$ is an optimal choice. This property removes the necessity of tuning the only hyper-parameter $k$ and leads to a running time quasi-linear in the sample size. Our results include sharp rates of convergence for our estimator, with a tight control of the mean square error and explicit constants. In particular, the variance of our estimators has the same rate of convergence as for standard parametric estimation despite their non-parametric nature. The proposed estimator shares similarities with some matching-based treatment effect estimators used, e.g., in biostatistics, econometrics, and epidemiology. Our experiments show that it achieves drastic reduction in the running time with remarkable accuracy.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2021

Strong mixing properties of discrete-valued time series with exogenous covariates

We derive strong mixing conditions for many existing discrete-valued time series models that include exogenous covariates in the dynamic. Our main contribution is to study how a mixing condition on the covariate process transfers to a mixing condition for the response. Using a coupling method, we first derive mixing conditions for some Markov chains in random environments, which gives a first result for some autoregressive categorical processes with strictly exogenous regressors. Our result is then extended to some infinite memory categorical processes. In the second part of the paper, we study autoregressive models for which the covariates are sequentially exogenous. Using a general random mapping approach on finite sets, we get explicit mixing conditions that can be checked for many categorical time series found in the literature, including multinomial autoregressive processes, ordinal time series and dynamic multiple choice models. We also study some autoregressive count time series using a somewhat different contraction argument. Our contribution fill an important gap for such models, presented here under a more general form, since such a strong mixing condition is often assumed in some recent works but no general approach is available to check it.

math.ST↗

arXiv2021

Ergodic properties of some Markov chains models in random environments

We study ergodic properties of some Markov chains models in random environments when the random Markov kernels that define the dynamic satisfy some usual drift and small set conditions but with random coefficients. In particular, we adapt a standard coupling scheme used for getting geometric ergodic properties for homogeneous Markov chains to the random environment case and we prove the existence of a process of randomly invariant probability measures for such chains, in the spirit of the approach of Kifer for chains satisfying some Doeblin type conditions. We then deduce ergodic properties of such chains when the environment is itself ergodic. Our results complement and sharpen existing ones by providing quite weak and easily checkable assumptions on the random Markov kernels. As a by-product, we obtain a framework for studying some time series models with strictly exogenous covariates. We illustrate our results with autoregressive time series with functional coefficients and some threshold autoregressive processes.

math.PR↗

arXiv2021

Multivariate time series models for mixed data

We introduce a general approach for modeling the dynamic of multivariate time series when the data are of mixed type (binary/count/continuous). Our method is quite flexible and conditionally on past values, each coordinate at time $t$ can have a distribution compatible with a standard univariate time series model such as GARCH, ARMA, INGARCH or logistic models whereas past values of the other coordinates play the role of exogenous covariates in the dynamic. The simultaneous dependence in the multivariate time series can be modeled with a copula. Additional exogenous covariates are also allowed in the dynamic. We first study usual stability properties of these models and then show that autoregressive parameters can be consistently estimated equation-by-equation using a pseudo-maximum likelihood method, leading to a fast implementation even when the number of time series is large. Moreover, we prove consistency results when a parametric copula model is fitted to the time series and in the case of Gaussian copulas, we show that the likelihood estimator of the correlation matrix is strongly consistent. We carefully check all our assumptions for two prototypical examples: a GARCH/INGARCH model and logistic/log-linear INGARCH model. Our results are illustrated with numerical experiments as well as two real data sets.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2020

Iterations of dependent random maps and exogeneity in nonlinear dynamics

We discuss existence and uniqueness of stationary and ergodic nonlinear autoregressive processes when exogenous regressors are incorporated in the dynamic. To this end, we consider the convergence of the backward iterations of dependent random maps. In particular, we give a new result when the classical condition of contraction on average is replaced with a contraction in conditional expectation. Under some conditions, we also derive an explicit control of the functional dependence of Wu (2005) which guarantees a wide range of statistical applications. Our results are illustrated with CHARN models, GARCH processes, count time series, binary choice models and categorical time series for which we provide many extensions of existing results.

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arXiv2020

Stationarity and ergodic properties for some observation-driven models in random environments

The first motivation of this paper is to study stationarity and ergodic properties for a general class of time series models defined conditional on an exogenous covariates process. The dynamic of these models is given by an autoregressive latent process which forms a Markov chain in random environments. Contrarily to existing contributions in the field of Markov chains in random environments, the state space is not discrete and we do not use small set type assumptions or uniform contraction conditions for the random Markov kernels. Our assumptions are quite general and allows to deal with models that are not fully contractive, such as threshold autoregressive processes. Using a coupling approach, we study the existence of a limit, in Wasserstein metric, for the backward iterations of the chain. We also derive ergodic properties for the corresponding skew-product Markov chain. Our results are illustrated with many examples of autoregressive processes widely used in statistics or in econometrics, including GARCH type processes, count autoregressions and categorical time series.

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arXiv2019

Stationarity and Moment Properties of some Multivariate Count Autoregressions

We study stationarity and moments properties of some count time series models from contraction and stability properties of iterated random maps. Both univariate and multivariate processes are considered, including the recent multivariate count time series models introduced recently by Doukhan et al. (2017). We improve many existing results by providing optimal stationarity conditions or conditions ensuring existence of some exponential moments.

math.ST↗

arXiv2019

Coupling and perturbation techniques for categorical time series

We present a general approach for studying autoregressive categorical time series models with dependence of infinite order and defined conditional on an exogenous covariate process. To this end, we adapt a coupling approach, developed in the literature for bounding the relaxation speed of a chain with complete connection and from which we derive a perturbation result for non-homogenous versions of such chains. We then study stationarity, ergodicity and dependence properties of some chains with complete connections and exogenous covariates. As a consequence, we obtain a general framework for studying some observation-driven time series models used both in statistics and econometrics but without theoretical support.

math.ST↗

arXiv2018

A perturbation analysis of some Markov chains models with time-varying parameters

We study some regularity properties in locally stationary Markov models which are fundamental for controlling the bias of nonparametric kernel estimators. In particular, we provide an alternative to the standard notion of derivative process developed in the literature and that can be used for studying a wide class of Markov processes. To this end, for some families of V-geometrically ergodic Markov kernels indexed by a real parameter u, we give conditions under which the invariant probability distribution is differentiable with respect to u, in the sense of signed measures. Our results also complete the existing literature for the perturbation analysis of Markov chains, in particular when exponential moments are not finite. Our conditions are checked on several original examples of locally stationary processes such as integer-valued autoregressive processes, categorical time series or threshold autoregressive processes.

math.ST↗

arXiv2018

On Categorical Time Series Models With Covariates

We study the problem of stationarity and ergodicity for autoregressive multinomial logistic time series models which possibly include a latent process and are defined by a GARCH-type recursive equation. We improve considerably upon the existing results related to stationarity and ergodicity conditions of such models. Proofs are based on theory developed for chains with complete connections. This approach is based on a useful coupling technique which is utilized for studying ergodicity of more general finite-state stochastic processes. Such processes generalize finite-state Markov chains by assuming infinite order models of past values. For finite order Markov chains, we also discuss ergodicity properties when some strongly exogenous covariates are considered in the dynamics of the process.

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