arXiv subjects

Xiaofeng Shao

Publications and source records attributed to Xiaofeng Shao.

49 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2017

Conditional Mean and Quantile Dependence Testing in High Dimension

Motivated by applications in biological science, we propose a novel test to assess the conditional mean dependence of a response variable on a large number of covariates. Our procedure is built on the martingale difference divergence recently proposed in Shao and Zhang (2014), and it is able to detect a certain type of departure from the null hypothesis of conditional mean independence without making any specific model assumptions. Theoretically, we establish the asymptotic normality of the proposed test statistic under suitable assumption on the eigenvalues of a Hermitian operator, which is constructed based on the characteristic function of the covariates. These conditions can be simplified under banded dependence structure on the covariates or Gaussian design. To account for heterogeneity within the data, we further develop a testing procedure for conditional quantile independence at a given quantile level and provide an asymptotic justification. Empirically, our test of conditional mean independence delivers comparable results to the competitor, which was constructed under the linear model framework, when the underlying model is linear. It significantly outperforms the competitor when the conditional mean admits a nonlinear form.

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arXiv2015

A subsampled double bootstrap for massive data

The bootstrap is a popular and powerful method for assessing precision of estimators and inferential methods. However, for massive datasets which are increasingly prevalent, the bootstrap becomes prohibitively costly in computation and its feasibility is questionable even with modern parallel computing platforms. Recently Kleiner, Talwalkar, Sarkar, and Jordan (2014) proposed a method called BLB (Bag of Little Bootstraps) for massive data which is more computationally scalable with little sacrifice of statistical accuracy. Building on BLB and the idea of fast double bootstrap, we propose a new resampling method, the subsampled double bootstrap, for both independent data and time series data. We establish consistency of the subsampled double bootstrap under mild conditions for both independent and dependent cases. Methodologically, the subsampled double bootstrap is superior to BLB in terms of running time, more sample coverage and automatic implementation with less tuning parameters for a given time budget. Its advantage relative to BLB and bootstrap is also demonstrated in numerical simulations and a data illustration.

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arXiv2015

Two sample inference for the second-order property of temporally dependent functional data

Motivated by the need to statistically quantify the difference between two spatio-temporal datasets that arise in climate downscaling studies, we propose new tests to detect the differences of the covariance operators and their associated characteristics of two functional time series. Our two sample tests are constructed on the basis of functional principal component analysis and self-normalization, the latter of which is a new studentization technique recently developed for the inference of a univariate time series. Compared to the existing tests, our SN-based tests allow for weak dependence within each sample and it is robust to the dependence between the two samples in the case of equal sample sizes. Asymptotic properties of the SN-based test statistics are derived under both the null and local alternatives. Through extensive simulations, our SN-based tests are shown to outperform existing alternatives in size and their powers are found to be respectable. The tests are then applied to the gridded climate model outputs and interpolated observations to detect the difference in their spatial dynamics.

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arXiv2014

On the Coverage Bound Problem of Empirical Likelihood Methods For Time Series

The upper bounds on the coverage probabilities of the confidence regions based on blockwise empirical likelihood [Kitamura (1997)] and nonstandard expansive empirical likelihood [Nordman et al. (2013)] methods for time series data are investigated via studying the probability for the violation of the convex hull constraint. The large sample bounds are derived on the basis of the pivotal limit of the blockwise empirical log-likelihood ratio obtained under the fixed-b asymptotics, which has been recently shown to provide a more accurate approximation to the finite sample distribution than the conventional chi-square approximation. Our theoretical and numerical findings suggest that both the finite sample and large sample upper bounds for coverage probabilities are strictly less than one and the blockwise empirical likelihood confidence region can exhibit serious undercoverage when (i) the dimension of moment conditions is moderate or large; (ii) the time series dependence is positively strong; or (iii) the block size is large relative to sample size. A similar finite sample coverage problem occurs for the nonstandard expansive empirical likelihood. To alleviate the coverage bound problem, we propose to penalize both empirical likelihood methods by relaxing the convex hull constraint. Numerical simulations and data illustration demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed remedies in terms of delivering confidence sets with more accurate coverage.

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arXiv2013

Fixed-smoothing asymptotics for time series

In this paper, we derive higher order Edgeworth expansions for the finite sample distributions of the subsampling-based t-statistic and the Wald statistic in the Gaussian location model under the so-called fixed-smoothing paradigm. In particular, we show that the error of asymptotic approximation is at the order of the reciprocal of the sample size and obtain explicit forms for the leading error terms in the expansions. The results are used to justify the second-order correctness of a new bootstrap method, the Gaussian dependent bootstrap, in the context of Gaussian location model.

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arXiv2013

A general approach to the joint asymptotic analysis of statistics from sub-samples

In time series analysis, statistics based on collections of estimators computed from sub-samples play a crucial role in an increasing variety of important applications. Proving results about the joint asymptotic distribution of such statistics is challenging since it typically involves a nontrivial verification of technical conditions and tedious case-by-case asymptotic analysis. In this paper, we provide a novel technique that allows to circumvent those problems in a general setting. Our approach consists of two major steps: a probabilistic part which is mainly concerned with weak convergence of sequential empirical processes, and an analytic part providing general ways to extend this weak convergence to functionals of the sequential empirical process. Our theory provides a unified treatment of asymptotic distributions for a large class of statistics, including recently proposed self-normalized statistics and sub-sampling based p-values. In addition, we comment on the consistency of bootstrap procedures and obtain general results on compact differentiability of certain mappings that seem to be of independent interest.

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arXiv2012

Fixed-b Subsampling and Block Bootstrap: Improved Confidence Sets Based on P-value Calibration

Subsampling and block-based bootstrap methods have been used in a wide range of inference problems for time series. To accommodate the dependence, these resampling methods involve a bandwidth parameter, such as subsampling window width and block size in the block-based bootstrap. In empirical work, using different bandwidth parameters could lead to different inference results, but the traditional first order asymptotic theory does not capture the choice of the bandwidth. In this article, we propose to adopt the fixed-b approach, as advocated by Kiefer and Vogelsang (2005) in the heteroscedasticity-autocorrelation robust testing context, to account for the influence of the bandwidth on the inference. Under the fixed-b asymptotic framework, we derive the asymptotic null distribution of the p-values for subsampling and the moving block bootstrap, and further propose a calibration of the traditional small-b based confidence intervals (regions, bands) and tests. Our treatment is fairly general as it includes both finite dimensional parameters and infinite dimensional parameters, such as marginal distribution function and normalized spectral distribution function. Simulation results show that the fixed-b approach is more accurate than the traditional small-b approach in terms of approximating the finite sample distribution, and that the calibrated confidence sets tend to have smaller coverage errors than the uncalibrated counterparts.

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arXiv2010

A self-normalized approach to confidence interval construction in time series

We propose a new method to construct confidence intervals for quantities that are associated with a stationary time series, which avoids direct estimation of the asymptotic variances. Unlike the existing tuning-parameter-dependent approaches, our method has the attractive convenience of being free of choosing any user-chosen number or smoothing parameter. The interval is constructed on the basis of an asymptotically distribution-free self-normalized statistic, in which the normalizing matrix is computed using recursive estimates. Under mild conditions, we establish the theoretical validity of our method for a broad class of statistics that are functionals of the empirical distribution of fixed or growing dimension. From a practical point of view, our method is conceptually simple, easy to implement and can be readily used by the practitioner. Monte-Carlo simulations are conducted to compare the finite sample performance of the new method with those delivered by the normal approximation and the block bootstrap approach.

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arXiv2009

Testing for white noise under unknown dependence and its applications to goodness-of-fit for time series models

Testing for white noise has been well studied in the literature of econometrics and statistics. For most of the proposed test statistics, such as the well-known Box-Pierce's test statistic with fixed lag truncation number, the asymptotic null distributions are obtained under independent and identically distributed assumptions and may not be valid for the dependent white noise. Due to recent popularity of conditional heteroscedastic models (e.g., GARCH models), which imply nonlinear dependence with zero autocorrelation, there is a need to understand the asymptotic properties of the existing test statistics under unknown dependence. In this paper, we showed that the asymptotic null distribution of Box-Pierce's test statistic with general weights still holds under unknown weak dependence so long as the lag truncation number grows at an appropriate rate with increasing sample size. Further applications to diagnostic checking of the ARMA and FARIMA models with dependent white noise errors are also addressed. Our results go beyond earlier ones by allowing non-Gaussian and conditional heteroscedastic errors in the ARMA and FARIMA models and provide theoretical support for some empirical findings reported in the literature.

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arXiv2009

Nonstationarity-extended Whittle Estimation

For long memory time series models with uncorrelated but dependent errors, we establish the asymptotic normality of the Whittle estimator under mild conditions. Our framework includes the widely used FARIMA models with GARCH-type innovations. To cover nonstationary fractionally integrated processes, we extend the idea of Abadir, Distaso and Giraitis (2007, Journal of Econometrics 141, 1353-1384) and develop the nonstationarity-extended Whittle estimation. The resulting estimator is shown to be asymptotically normal and is more efficient than the tapered Whittle estimator. Finally, the results from a small simulation study are presented to corroborate our theoretical findings.

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arXiv2008

A generalized portmanteau test of independence between two stationary time series

We propose generalized portmanteau-type test statistics in the frequency domain to test independence between two stationary time series. The test statistics are formed analogous to the one in Chen and Deo (2004, Econometric Theory 20, 382-416), who extended the applicability of portmanteau goodness-of-fit test to the long memory case. Under the null hypothesis of independence, the asymptotic standard normal distributions of the proposed statistics are derived under fairly mild conditions. In particular, each time series is allowed to possess short memory, long memory or anti-persistence. A simulation study shows that the tests have reasonable size and power properties.

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arXiv2007

Asymptotic spectral theory for nonlinear time series

We consider asymptotic problems in spectral analysis of stationary causal processes. Limiting distributions of periodograms and smoothed periodogram spectral density estimates are obtained and applications to the spectral domain bootstrap are given. Instead of the commonly used strong mixing conditions, in our asymptotic spectral theory we impose conditions only involving (conditional) moments, which are easily verifiable for a variety of nonlinear time series.

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arXiv2006

Invariance principles for fractionally integrated nonlinear processes

We obtain invariance principles for a wide class of fractionally integrated nonlinear processes. The limiting distributions are shown to be fractional Brownian motions. Under very mild conditions, we extend earlier ones on long memory linear processes to a more general setting. The invariance principles are applied to the popular R/S and KPSS tests.

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