15,581 research outputs found
Stochastic approximation of score functions for Gaussian processes
We discuss the statistical properties of a recently introduced unbiased
stochastic approximation to the score equations for maximum likelihood
calculation for Gaussian processes. Under certain conditions, including bounded
condition number of the covariance matrix, the approach achieves storage
and nearly computational effort per optimization step, where is the
number of data sites. Here, we prove that if the condition number of the
covariance matrix is bounded, then the approximate score equations are nearly
optimal in a well-defined sense. Therefore, not only is the approximation
efficient to compute, but it also has comparable statistical properties to the
exact maximum likelihood estimates. We discuss a modification of the stochastic
approximation in which design elements of the stochastic terms mimic patterns
from a factorial design. We prove these designs are always at least as
good as the unstructured design, and we demonstrate through simulation that
they can produce a substantial improvement over random designs. Our findings
are validated by numerical experiments on simulated data sets of up to 1
million observations. We apply the approach to fit a space-time model to over
80,000 observations of total column ozone contained in the latitude band
-N during April 2012.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/13-AOAS627 the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Regularization and Bayesian Learning in Dynamical Systems: Past, Present and Future
Regularization and Bayesian methods for system identification have been
repopularized in the recent years, and proved to be competitive w.r.t.
classical parametric approaches. In this paper we shall make an attempt to
illustrate how the use of regularization in system identification has evolved
over the years, starting from the early contributions both in the Automatic
Control as well as Econometrics and Statistics literature. In particular we
shall discuss some fundamental issues such as compound estimation problems and
exchangeability which play and important role in regularization and Bayesian
approaches, as also illustrated in early publications in Statistics. The
historical and foundational issues will be given more emphasis (and space), at
the expense of the more recent developments which are only briefly discussed.
The main reason for such a choice is that, while the recent literature is
readily available, and surveys have already been published on the subject, in
the author's opinion a clear link with past work had not been completely
clarified.Comment: Plenary Presentation at the IFAC SYSID 2015. Submitted to Annual
Reviews in Contro
Good, great, or lucky? Screening for firms with sustained superior performance using heavy-tailed priors
This paper examines historical patterns of ROA (return on assets) for a
cohort of 53,038 publicly traded firms across 93 countries, measured over the
past 45 years. Our goal is to screen for firms whose ROA trajectories suggest
that they have systematically outperformed their peer groups over time. Such a
project faces at least three statistical difficulties: adjustment for relevant
covariates, massive multiplicity, and longitudinal dependence. We conclude
that, once these difficulties are taken into account, demonstrably superior
performance appears to be quite rare. We compare our findings with other recent
management studies on the same subject, and with the popular literature on
corporate success. Our methodological contribution is to propose a new class of
priors for use in large-scale simultaneous testing. These priors are based on
the hypergeometric inverted-beta family, and have two main attractive features:
heavy tails and computational tractability. The family is a four-parameter
generalization of the normal/inverted-beta prior, and is the natural conjugate
prior for shrinkage coefficients in a hierarchical normal model. Our results
emphasize the usefulness of these heavy-tailed priors in large multiple-testing
problems, as they have a mild rate of tail decay in the marginal likelihood
---a property long recognized to be important in testing.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-AOAS512 the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
- …