Multivariate-Sign-Based High-Dimensional Tests for the Two-Sample Location Problem

<p>This article concerns tests for the two-sample location problem when data dimension is larger than the sample size. Existing multivariate-sign-based procedures are not robust against high dimensionality, producing tests with Type I error rates far away from nominal levels. This is mainly due to the biases from estimating location parameters. We propose a novel test to overcome this issue by using the “leave-one-out” idea. The proposed test statistic is scalar-invariant and thus is particularly useful when different components have different scales in high-dimensional data. Asymptotic properties of the test statistic are studied. Compared with other existing approaches, simulation studies show that the proposed method behaves well in terms of sizes and power. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.</p

Nonparametric Dynamic Curve Monitoring

<p>Rapid sequential comparison between the longitudinal pattern of a given subject and a target pattern has become increasingly important in modern scientific research for detecting abnormal activities in many data-rich applications. This article focuses on this problem when observations are collected sequentially with uncorrelated or correlated noise involved. A dynamic monitoring procedure is developed after connecting the curve monitoring problem to curve comparison. Under the framework of generalized likelihood ratio testing, we suggest a new exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) control chart that can accommodate unequally spaced design points. An adaptive parameter selection feature is built in the proposed control chart so that the chart can detect a wide range of longitudinal pattern shifts effectively. To furnish fast computation, recursive formulas are derived for computing the charting statistic. Numerical studies show that the proposed method can deliver a satisfactory performance, and it outperforms existing methods in various cases. An example from the semiconductor manufacturing industry is used for the illustration of its implementation. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.</p

A new multivariate EWMA scheme for monitoring covariance matrices

<div><p></p><p>To monitor covariance matrices, most of the existing control charts are based on some omnibus test and thus usually are not powerful when one is interested in detecting shifts that occur in a small number of elements of the covariance matrix. A new multivariate exponentially weighted moving average control chart is developed for the monitor of the covariance matrices by integrating the classical -norm-based test with a maximum-norm-based test. Numerical studies show that the new control chart affords more balanced performance under various shift directions than the existing ones and is thus an effective tool for multivariate SPC applications. The implementation of the proposed control chart is demonstrated with an example from the health care industry.</p></div

A Distribution-Free Multivariate Control Chart

<div><p>Monitoring multivariate quality variables or data streams remains an important and challenging problem in statistical process control (SPC). Although the multivariate SPC has been extensively studied in the literature, designing distribution-free control schemes are still challenging and yet to be addressed well. This paper develops a new nonparametric methodology for monitoring location parameters when only a small reference dataset is available. The key idea is to construct a series of conditionally distribution-free test statistics in the sense that their distributions are free of the underlying distribution given the empirical distribution functions. The conditional probability that the charting statistic exceeds the control limit at present given that there is no alarm before the current time point can be guaranteed to attain a specified false alarm rate. The success of the proposed method lies in the use of data-dependent control limits, which are determined based on the observations on-line rather than decided before monitoring. Our theoretical and numerical studies show that the proposed control chart is able to deliver satisfactory in-control run-length performance for any distributions with any dimension. It is also very efficient in detecting multivariate process shifts when the process distribution is heavy-tailed or skewed. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.</p></div

A Change Point Approach for Phase-I Analysis in Multivariate Profile Monitoring and Diagnosis

<div><p>Process monitoring and fault diagnosis using profile data remains an important and challenging problem in statistical process control (SPC). Although the analysis of profile data has been extensively studied in the SPC literature, the challenges associated with monitoring and diagnosis of multichannel (multiple) nonlinear profiles are yet to be addressed. Motivated by an application in multi-operation forging processes, we propose a new modeling, monitoring and diagnosis framework for phase-I analysis of multichannel profiles. The proposed framework is developed under the assumption that different profile channels have similar structure so that we can gain strength by borrowing information from all channels. The multi-dimensional functional principal component analysis is incorporated into change-point models to construct monitoring statistics. Simulation results show that the proposed approach has good performance in identifying change-points in various situations compared with some existing methods. The codes for implementing the proposed procedure are available in the supplementary material.</p></div

Model-Free Statistical Inference on High-Dimensional Data*

This paper aims to develop an effective model-free inference procedure for high-dimensional data. We first reformulate the hypothesis testing problem via sufficient dimension reduction framework. With the aid of new reformulation, we propose a new test statistic and show that its asymptotic distribution is χ2 distribution whose degree of freedom does not depend on the unknown population distribution. We further conduct power analysis under local alternative hypotheses. In addition, we study how to control the false discovery rate of the proposed χ2 tests, which are correlated, to identify important predictors under a model-free framework. To this end, we propose a multiple testing procedure and establish its theoretical guarantees. Monte Carlo simulation studies are conducted to assess the performance of the proposed tests and an empirical analysis of a real-world data set is used to illustrate the proposed methodology.</p