Robust rank correlation based screening

Independence screening is a variable selection method that uses a ranking criterion to select significant variables, particularly for statistical models with nonpolynomial dimensionality or "large p, small n" paradigms when p can be as large as an exponential of the sample size n. In this paper we propose a robust rank correlation screening (RRCS) method to deal with ultra-high dimensional data. The new procedure is based on the Kendall \tau correlation coefficient between response and predictor variables rather than the Pearson correlation of existing methods. The new method has four desirable features compared with existing independence screening methods. First, the sure independence screening property can hold only under the existence of a second order moment of predictor variables, rather than exponential tails or alikeness, even when the number of predictor variables grows as fast as exponentially of the sample size. Second, it can be used to deal with semiparametric models such as transformation regression models and single-index models under monotonic constraint to the link function without involving nonparametric estimation even when there are nonparametric functions in the models. Third, the procedure can be largely used against outliers and influence points in the observations. Last, the use of indicator functions in rank correlation screening greatly simplifies the theoretical derivation due to the boundedness of the resulting statistics, compared with previous studies on variable screening. Simulations are carried out for comparisons with existing methods and a real data example is analyzed.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/12-AOS1024 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org). arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:0903.525

Doubly Robust Inference when Combining Probability and Non-probability Samples with High-dimensional Data

Non-probability samples become increasingly popular in survey statistics but may suffer from selection biases that limit the generalizability of results to the target population. We consider integrating a non-probability sample with a probability sample which provides high-dimensional representative covariate information of the target population. We propose a two-step approach for variable selection and finite population inference. In the first step, we use penalized estimating equations with folded-concave penalties to select important variables for the sampling score of selection into the non-probability sample and the outcome model. We show that the penalized estimating equation approach enjoys the selection consistency property for general probability samples. The major technical hurdle is due to the possible dependence of the sample under the finite population framework. To overcome this challenge, we construct martingales which enable us to apply Bernstein concentration inequality for martingales. In the second step, we focus on a doubly robust estimator of the finite population mean and re-estimate the nuisance model parameters by minimizing the asymptotic squared bias of the doubly robust estimator. This estimating strategy mitigates the possible first-step selection error and renders the doubly robust estimator root-n consistent if either the sampling probability or the outcome model is correctly specified

Penalized single-index quantile regression

This article is made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund. Copyright for this article is retained by the author(s), with first publication rights granted to the journal. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).The single-index (SI) regression and single-index quantile (SIQ) estimation methods product linear combinations of all the original predictors. However, it is possible that there are many unimportant predictors within the original predictors. Thus, the precision of parameter estimation as well as the accuracy of prediction will be effected by the existence of those unimportant predictors when the previous methods are used. In this article, an extension of the SIQ method of Wu et al. (2010) has been proposed, which considers Lasso and Adaptive Lasso for estimation and variable selection. Computational algorithms have been developed in order to calculate the penalized SIQ estimates. A simulation study and a real data application have been used to assess the performance of the methods under consideration

Multinomial Inverse Regression for Text Analysis

Text data, including speeches, stories, and other document forms, are often connected to sentiment variables that are of interest for research in marketing, economics, and elsewhere. It is also very high dimensional and difficult to incorporate into statistical analyses. This article introduces a straightforward framework of sentiment-preserving dimension reduction for text data. Multinomial inverse regression is introduced as a general tool for simplifying predictor sets that can be represented as draws from a multinomial distribution, and we show that logistic regression of phrase counts onto document annotations can be used to obtain low dimension document representations that are rich in sentiment information. To facilitate this modeling, a novel estimation technique is developed for multinomial logistic regression with very high-dimension response. In particular, independent Laplace priors with unknown variance are assigned to each regression coefficient, and we detail an efficient routine for maximization of the joint posterior over coefficients and their prior scale. This "gamma-lasso" scheme yields stable and effective estimation for general high-dimension logistic regression, and we argue that it will be superior to current methods in many settings. Guidelines for prior specification are provided, algorithm convergence is detailed, and estimator properties are outlined from the perspective of the literature on non-concave likelihood penalization. Related work on sentiment analysis from statistics, econometrics, and machine learning is surveyed and connected. Finally, the methods are applied in two detailed examples and we provide out-of-sample prediction studies to illustrate their effectiveness.Comment: Published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association 108, 2013, with discussion (rejoinder is here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.4200). Software is available in the textir package for