Closed-Loop Statistical Verification of Stochastic Nonlinear Systems Subject to Parametric Uncertainties

This paper proposes a statistical verification framework using Gaussian processes (GPs) for simulation-based verification of stochastic nonlinear systems with parametric uncertainties. Given a small number of stochastic simulations, the proposed framework constructs a GP regression model and predicts the system's performance over the entire set of possible uncertainties. Included in the framework is a new metric to estimate the confidence in those predictions based on the variance of the GP's cumulative distribution function. This variance-based metric forms the basis of active sampling algorithms that aim to minimize prediction error through careful selection of simulations. In three case studies, the new active sampling algorithms demonstrate up to a 35% improvement in prediction error over other approaches and are able to correctly identify regions with low prediction confidence through the variance metric.Comment: 8 pages, submitted to ACC 201

Functional Regression

Functional data analysis (FDA) involves the analysis of data whose ideal units of observation are functions defined on some continuous domain, and the observed data consist of a sample of functions taken from some population, sampled on a discrete grid. Ramsay and Silverman's 1997 textbook sparked the development of this field, which has accelerated in the past 10 years to become one of the fastest growing areas of statistics, fueled by the growing number of applications yielding this type of data. One unique characteristic of FDA is the need to combine information both across and within functions, which Ramsay and Silverman called replication and regularization, respectively. This article will focus on functional regression, the area of FDA that has received the most attention in applications and methodological development. First will be an introduction to basis functions, key building blocks for regularization in functional regression methods, followed by an overview of functional regression methods, split into three types: [1] functional predictor regression (scalar-on-function), [2] functional response regression (function-on-scalar) and [3] function-on-function regression. For each, the role of replication and regularization will be discussed and the methodological development described in a roughly chronological manner, at times deviating from the historical timeline to group together similar methods. The primary focus is on modeling and methodology, highlighting the modeling structures that have been developed and the various regularization approaches employed. At the end is a brief discussion describing potential areas of future development in this field

Some New Approaches to Forecasting the Price of Electricity: A Study of Californian Market

In this paper we consider the forecasting performance of a range of semi- and non- parametric methods applied to high frequency electricity price data. Electricity price time-series data tend to be highly seasonal, mean reverting with price jumps/spikes and time- and price-dependent volatility. The typical approach in this area has been to use a range of tools that have proven popular in the financial econometrics literature, where volatility clustering is common. However, electricity time series tend to exhibit higher volatility on a daily basis, but within a mean reverting framework, albeit with occasional large ’spikes’. In this paper we compare the existing forecasting performance of some popular parametric methods, notably GARCH AR-MAX, with approaches that are new to this area of applied econometrics, in particular, Artificial Neural Networks (ANN); Linear Regression Trees, Local Regressions and Generalised Additive Models. Section 2 presents the properties and definitions of the models to be compared and Section 3 the characteristics of the data used which in this case are spot electricity prices from the Californian market 07/1999-12/2000. This period includes the ’crisis’ months of May-August 2000 where extreme volatility was observed. Section 4 presents the results and ranking of methods on the basis of forecasting performance. Section 5 concludes.Electricty Time Series; Forecasting Performance; Semi- and Non- Parametric Methods

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.Comment: 40 pages, 14 figure

Semiparametric estimation for a class of time-inhomogenous diffusion processes

Copyright @ 2009 Institute of Statistical Science, Academia SinicaWe develop two likelihood-based approaches to semiparametrically estimate a class of time-inhomogeneous diffusion processes: log penalized splines (P-splines) and the local log-linear method. Positive volatility is naturally embedded and this positivity is not guaranteed in most existing diffusion models. We investigate different smoothing parameter selections. Separate bandwidths are used for drift and volatility estimation. In the log P-splines approach, different smoothness for different time varying coefficients is feasible by assigning different penalty parameters. We also provide theorems for both approaches and report statistical inference results. Finally, we present a case study using the weekly three-month Treasury bill data from 1954 to 2004. We find that the log P-splines approach seems to capture the volatility dip in mid-1960s the best. We also present an application to calculate a financial market risk measure called Value at Risk (VaR) using statistical estimates from log P-splines