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Peter Bühlmann

Publications and source records attributed to Peter Bühlmann.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources
arXiv2016

Computationally efficient change point detection for high-dimensional regression

Large-scale sequential data is often exposed to some degree of inhomogeneity in the form of sudden changes in the parameters of the data-generating process. We consider the problem of detecting such structural changes in a high-dimensional regression setting. We propose a joint estimator of the number and the locations of the change points and of the parameters in the corresponding segments. The estimator can be computed using dynamic programming or, as we emphasize here, it can be approximated using a binary search algorithm with $O(n \log(n) \mathrm{Lasso}(n))$ computational operations while still enjoying essentially the same theoretical properties; here $\mathrm{Lasso}(n)$ denotes the computational cost of computing the Lasso for sample size $n$. We establish oracle inequalities for the estimator as well as for its binary search approximation, covering also the case with a large (asymptotically growing) number of change points. We evaluate the performance of the proposed estimation algorithms on simulated data and apply the methodology to real data.

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arXiv2015

High-Dimensional Inference: Confidence Intervals, $p$-Values and R-Software hdi

We present a (selective) review of recent frequentist high-dimensional inference methods for constructing $p$-values and confidence intervals in linear and generalized linear models. We include a broad, comparative empirical study which complements the viewpoint from statistical methodology and theory. Furthermore, we introduce and illustrate the R-package hdi which easily allows the use of different methods and supports reproducibility.

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arXiv2015

Causal inference using invariant prediction: identification and confidence intervals

What is the difference of a prediction that is made with a causal model and a non-causal model? Suppose we intervene on the predictor variables or change the whole environment. The predictions from a causal model will in general work as well under interventions as for observational data. In contrast, predictions from a non-causal model can potentially be very wrong if we actively intervene on variables. Here, we propose to exploit this invariance of a prediction under a causal model for causal inference: given different experimental settings (for example various interventions) we collect all models that do show invariance in their predictive accuracy across settings and interventions. The causal model will be a member of this set of models with high probability. This approach yields valid confidence intervals for the causal relationships in quite general scenarios. We examine the example of structural equation models in more detail and provide sufficient assumptions under which the set of causal predictors becomes identifiable. We further investigate robustness properties of our approach under model misspecification and discuss possible extensions. The empirical properties are studied for various data sets, including large-scale gene perturbation experiments.

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arXiv2015

Marginal integration for nonparametric causal inference

We consider the problem of inferring the total causal effect of a single variable intervention on a (response) variable of interest. We propose a certain marginal integration regression technique for a very general class of potentially nonlinear structural equation models (SEMs) with known structure, or at least known superset of adjustment variables: we call the procedure S-mint regression. We easily derive that it achieves the convergence rate as for nonparametric regression: for example, single variable intervention effects can be estimated with convergence rate $n^{-2/5}$ assuming smoothness with twice differentiable functions. Our result can also be seen as a major robustness property with respect to model misspecification which goes much beyond the notion of double robustness. Furthermore, when the structure of the SEM is not known, we can estimate (the equivalence class of) the directed acyclic graph corresponding to the SEM, and then proceed by using S-mint based on these estimates. We empirically compare the S-mint regression method with more classical approaches and argue that the former is indeed more robust, more reliable and substantially simpler.

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arXiv2015

Maximin effects in inhomogeneous large-scale data

Large-scale data are often characterized by some degree of inhomogeneity as data are either recorded in different time regimes or taken from multiple sources. We look at regression models and the effect of randomly changing coefficients, where the change is either smoothly in time or some other dimension or even without any such structure. Fitting varying-coefficient models or mixture models can be appropriate solutions but are computationally very demanding and often return more information than necessary. If we just ask for a model estimator that shows good predictive properties for all regimes of the data, then we are aiming for a simple linear model that is reliable for all possible subsets of the data. We propose the concept of "maximin effects" and a suitable estimator and look at its prediction accuracy from a theoretical point of view in a mixture model with known or unknown group structure. Under certain circumstances the estimator can be computed orders of magnitudes faster than standard penalized regression estimators, making computations on large-scale data feasible. Empirical examples complement the novel methodology and theory.

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arXiv2015

Score-based Causal Learning in Additive Noise Models

Given data sampled from a number of variables, one is often interested in the underlying causal relationships in the form of a directed acyclic graph. In the general case, without interventions on some of the variables it is only possible to identify the graph up to its Markov equivalence class. However, in some situations one can find the true causal graph just from observational data, for example in structural equation models with additive noise and nonlinear edge functions. Most current methods for achieving this rely on nonparametric independence tests. One of the problems there is that the null hypothesis is independence, which is what one would like to get evidence for. We take a different approach in our work by using a penalized likelihood as a score for model selection. This is practically feasible in many settings and has the advantage of yielding a natural ranking of the candidate models. When making smoothness assumptions on the probability density space, we prove consistency of the penalized maximum likelihood estimator. We also present empirical results for simulated scenarios and real two-dimensional data sets (cause-effect pairs) where we obtain similar results as other state-of-the-art methods.

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arXiv2015

High-dimensional inference in misspecified linear models

We consider high-dimensional inference when the assumed linear model is misspecified. We describe some correct interpretations and corresponding sufficient assumptions for valid asymptotic inference of the model parameters, which still have a useful meaning when the model is misspecified. We largely focus on the de-sparsified Lasso procedure but we also indicate some implications for (multiple) sample splitting techniques. In view of available methods and software, our results contribute to robustness considerations with respect to model misspecification.

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arXiv2015

Confidence Intervals for Maximin Effects in Inhomogeneous Large-Scale Data

One challenge of large-scale data analysis is that the assumption of an identical distribution for all samples is often not realistic. An optimal linear regression might, for example, be markedly different for distinct groups of the data. Maximin effects have been proposed as a computationally attractive way to estimate effects that are common across all data without fitting a mixture distribution explicitly. So far just point estimators of the common maximin effects have been proposed in Meinshausen and Bühlmann (2014). Here we propose asymptotically valid confidence regions for these effects.

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arXiv2015

A sequential rejection testing method for high-dimensional regression with correlated variables

We propose a general, modular method for significance testing of groups (or clusters) of variables in a high-dimensional linear model. In presence of high correlations among the covariables, due to serious problems of identifiability, it is indispensable to focus on detecting groups of variables rather than singletons. We propose an inference method which allows to build in hierarchical structures. It relies on repeated sample splitting and sequential rejection, and we prove that it asymptotically controls the familywise error rate. It can be implemented on any collection of clusters and leads to improved power in comparison to more standard non-sequential rejection methods. We complete the theoretical analysis with empirical results for simulated and real data.

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arXiv2014

CAM: Causal additive models, high-dimensional order search and penalized regression

We develop estimation for potentially high-dimensional additive structural equation models. A key component of our approach is to decouple order search among the variables from feature or edge selection in a directed acyclic graph encoding the causal structure. We show that the former can be done with nonregularized (restricted) maximum likelihood estimation while the latter can be efficiently addressed using sparse regression techniques. Thus, we substantially simplify the problem of structure search and estimation for an important class of causal models. We establish consistency of the (restricted) maximum likelihood estimator for low- and high-dimensional scenarios, and we also allow for misspecification of the error distribution. Furthermore, we develop an efficient computational algorithm which can deal with many variables, and the new method's accuracy and performance is illustrated on simulated and real data.

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arXiv2014

Magging: maximin aggregation for inhomogeneous large-scale data

Large-scale data analysis poses both statistical and computational problems which need to be addressed simultaneously. A solution is often straightforward if the data are homogeneous: one can use classical ideas of subsampling and mean aggregation to get a computationally efficient solution with acceptable statistical accuracy, where the aggregation step simply averages the results obtained on distinct subsets of the data. However, if the data exhibit inhomogeneities (and typically they do), the same approach will be inadequate, as it will be unduly influenced by effects that are not persistent across all the data due to, for example, outliers or time-varying effects. We show that a tweak to the aggregation step can produce an estimator of effects which are common to all data, and hence interesting for interpretation and often leading to better prediction than pooled effects.

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arXiv2014

Hierarchical Testing in the High-Dimensional Setting with Correlated Variables

We propose a method for testing whether hierarchically ordered groups of potentially correlated variables are significant for explaining a response in a high-dimensional linear model. In presence of highly correlated variables, as is very common in high-dimensional data, it seems indispensable to go beyond an approach of inferring individual regression coefficients, and we show that detecting smallest groups of variables (MTDs: minimal true detections) is realistic. Thanks to the hierarchy among the groups of variables, powerful multiple testing adjustment is possible which leads to a data-driven choice of the resolution level for the groups. Our procedure, based on repeated sample splitting, is shown to asymptotically control the familywise error rate and we provide empirical results for simulated and real data which complement the theoretical analysis. Supplementary materials for this article are available after the References.

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arXiv2014

On asymptotically optimal confidence regions and tests for high-dimensional models

We propose a general method for constructing confidence intervals and statistical tests for single or low-dimensional components of a large parameter vector in a high-dimensional model. It can be easily adjusted for multiplicity taking dependence among tests into account. For linear models, our method is essentially the same as in Zhang and Zhang [J. R. Stat. Soc. Ser. B Stat. Methodol. 76 (2014) 217-242]: we analyze its asymptotic properties and establish its asymptotic optimality in terms of semiparametric efficiency. Our method naturally extends to generalized linear models with convex loss functions. We develop the corresponding theory which includes a careful analysis for Gaussian, sub-Gaussian and bounded correlated designs.

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arXiv2014

Discussion of Big Bayes Stories and BayesBag

I congratulate all the authors for their insightful papers with wide-ranging contributions. The articles demonstrate the power and elegance of the Bayesian inference paradigm. In particular, it allows to incorporate prior knowledge as well as hierarchical model building in a convincing way. Regarding the latter, the contribution by Raftery, Alkema and German is a very fascinating piece, as it addresses a set of problems of great public interest and presents predictions for the world populations and other interesting quantities with uncertainty regions. Their approach is based on a hierarchical model, taking various characteristics into account (e.g., fertility projections). It would have been very difficult to come up with a "better" solution which would be as clear in terms of interpretation (in contrast to a "black-box machine") and which would provide (model-based) uncertainties for the predictions into the future.

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arXiv2014

Structural Intervention Distance (SID) for Evaluating Causal Graphs

Causal inference relies on the structure of a graph, often a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Different graphs may result in different causal inference statements and different intervention distributions. To quantify such differences, we propose a (pre-) distance between DAGs, the structural intervention distance (SID). The SID is based on a graphical criterion only and quantifies the closeness between two DAGs in terms of their corresponding causal inference statements. It is therefore well-suited for evaluating graphs that are used for computing interventions. Instead of DAGs it is also possible to compare CPDAGs, completed partially directed acyclic graphs that represent Markov equivalence classes. Since it differs significantly from the popular Structural Hamming Distance (SHD), the SID constitutes a valuable additional measure. We discuss properties of this distance and provide an efficient implementation with software code available on the first author's homepage (an R package is under construction).

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arXiv2013

Hypersurfaces and their singularities in partial correlation testing

An asymptotic theory is developed for computing volumes of regions in the parameter space of a directed Gaussian graphical model that are obtained by bounding partial correlations. We study these volumes using the method of real log canonical thresholds from algebraic geometry. Our analysis involves the computation of the singular loci of correlation hypersurfaces. Statistical applications include the strong-faithfulness assumption for the PC-algorithm, and the quantification of confounder bias in causal inference. A detailed analysis is presented for trees, bow-ties, tripartite graphs, and complete graphs.

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arXiv2013

High-dimensional learning of linear causal networks via inverse covariance estimation

We establish a new framework for statistical estimation of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) when data are generated from a linear, possibly non-Gaussian structural equation model. Our framework consists of two parts: (1) inferring the moralized graph from the support of the inverse covariance matrix; and (2) selecting the best-scoring graph amongst DAGs that are consistent with the moralized graph. We show that when the error variances are known or estimated to close enough precision, the true DAG is the unique minimizer of the score computed using the reweighted squared l_2-loss. Our population-level results have implications for the identifiability of linear SEMs when the error covariances are specified up to a constant multiple. On the statistical side, we establish rigorous conditions for high-dimensional consistency of our two-part algorithm, defined in terms of a "gap" between the true DAG and the next best candidate. Finally, we demonstrate that dynamic programming may be used to select the optimal DAG in linear time when the treewidth of the moralized graph is bounded.

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