arXiv subjects

Yichen Qin

Publications and source records attributed to Yichen Qin.

25 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2018

Model Confidence Bounds for Variable Selection

In this article, we introduce the concept of model confidence bounds (MCB) for variable selection in the context of nested models. Similarly to the endpoints in the familiar confidence interval for parameter estimation, the MCB identifies two nested models (upper and lower confidence bound models) containing the true model at a given level of confidence. Instead of trusting a single selected model obtained from a given model selection method, the MCB proposes a group of nested models as candidates and the MCB's width and composition enable the practitioner to assess the overall model selection uncertainty. A new graphical tool --- the model uncertainty curve (MUC) --- is introduced to visualize the variability of model selection and to compare different model selection procedures. The MCB methodology is implemented by a fast bootstrap algorithm that is shown to yield the correct asymptotic coverage under rather general conditions. Our Monte Carlo simulations and real data examples confirm the validity and illustrate the advantages of the proposed method.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2017

Statistical inference on random dot product graphs: a survey

The random dot product graph (RDPG) is an independent-edge random graph that is analytically tractable and, simultaneously, either encompasses or can successfully approximate a wide range of random graphs, from relatively simple stochastic block models to complex latent position graphs. In this survey paper, we describe a comprehensive paradigm for statistical inference on random dot product graphs, a paradigm centered on spectral embeddings of adjacency and Laplacian matrices. We examine the analogues, in graph inference, of several canonical tenets of classical Euclidean inference: in particular, we summarize a body of existing results on the consistency and asymptotic normality of the adjacency and Laplacian spectral embeddings, and the role these spectral embeddings can play in the construction of single- and multi-sample hypothesis tests for graph data. We investigate several real-world applications, including community detection and classification in large social networks and the determination of functional and biologically relevant network properties from an exploratory data analysis of the Drosophila connectome. We outline requisite background and current open problems in spectral graph inference.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2017

Penalized Maximum Tangent Likelihood Estimation and Robust Variable Selection

We introduce a new class of mean regression estimators -- penalized maximum tangent likelihood estimation -- for high-dimensional regression estimation and variable selection. We first explain the motivations for the key ingredient, maximum tangent likelihood estimation (MTE), and establish its asymptotic properties. We further propose a penalized MTE for variable selection and show that it is $\sqrt{n}$-consistent, enjoys the oracle property. The proposed class of estimators consists penalized $\ell_2$ distance, penalized exponential squared loss, penalized least trimmed square and penalized least square as special cases and can be regarded as a mixture of minimum Kullback-Leibler distance estimation and minimum $\ell_2$ distance estimation. Furthermore, we consider the proposed class of estimators under the high-dimensional setting when the number of variables $d$ can grow exponentially with the sample size $n$, and show that the entire class of estimators (including the aforementioned special cases) can achieve the optimal rate of convergence in the order of $\sqrt{\ln(d)/n}$. Finally, simulation studies and real data analysis demonstrate the advantages of the penalized MTE.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2017

Semiparametric spectral modeling of the Drosophila connectome

We present semiparametric spectral modeling of the complete larval Drosophila mushroom body connectome. Motivated by a thorough exploratory data analysis of the network via Gaussian mixture modeling (GMM) in the adjacency spectral embedding (ASE) representation space, we introduce the latent structure model (LSM) for network modeling and inference. LSM is a generalization of the stochastic block model (SBM) and a special case of the random dot product graph (RDPG) latent position model, and is amenable to semiparametric GMM in the ASE representation space. The resulting connectome code derived via semiparametric GMM composed with ASE captures latent connectome structure and elucidates biologically relevant neuronal properties.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2016

Variable Selection with Scalable Bootstrap in Generalized Linear Model for Massive Data

Bootstrap is commonly used as a tool for non-parametric statistical inference to estimate meaningful parameters in Variable Selection Models. However, for massive dataset that has exponential growth rate, the computation of Bootstrap Variable Selection (BootVS) can be a crucial issue. In this paper, we propose the method of Variable Selection with Bag of Little Bootstraps (BLBVS) on General Linear Regression and extend it to Generalized Linear Model for selecting important parameters and assessing the quality of estimators' computation efficiency by analyzing results of multiple bootstrap sub-samples. The introduced method best suits large datasets which have parallel and distributed computing structures. To test the performance of BLBVS, we compare it with BootVS from different aspects via empirical studies. The results of simulations show our method has excellent performance. A real data analysis, Risk Forecast of Credit Cards, is also presented to illustrate the computational superiority of BLBVS on large scale datasets, and the result demonstrates the usefulness and validity of our proposed method.

stat.CO↗

arXiv2016

Copula Modeling for Data with Ties

Copula modeling has gained much attention in many fields recently with the advantage of separating dependence structure from marginal distributions. In real data, however, serious ties are often present in one or multiple margins, which cause problems to many rank-based statistical methods developed under the assumption of continuous data with no ties. Simple methods such as breaking the ties at random or using average rank introduce independence into the data and, hence, lead to biased estimation. We propose an estimation method that treats the ranks of tied data as being interval censored and maximizes a pseudo-likelihood based on interval censored pseudo-observations. A parametric bootstrap procedure that preserves the observed tied ranks in the data is adapted to assess the estimation uncertainty and perform goodness-of-fit tests. The proposed approach is shown to be very competitive in comparison to the simple treatments in a large scale simulation study. Application to a bivariate insurance data illustrates the methodology.

stat.ME↗

arXiv2016

Robust Hypothesis Testing via Lq-Likelihood

This article introduces a robust hypothesis testing procedure: the Lq-likelihood-ratio-type test (LqRT). By deriving the asymptotic distribution of this test statistic, the authors demonstrate its robustness both analytically and numerically, and they investigate the properties of both its influence function and its breakdown point. A proposed method to select the tuning parameter q offers a good efficiency/robustness trade-off, compared with the traditional likelihood ratio test (LRT) and other robust tests. A simulation and real data analysis provides further evidence of the advantages of the proposed LqRT method. In particular, for the special case of testing the location parameter in the presence of gross error contamination, the LqRT dominates the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test and the sign test at various levels of contamination.

stat.AP↗