18,345 research outputs found
Choosing the Right Spatial Weighting Matrix in a Quantile Regression Model
This paper proposes computationally tractable methods for selecting the appropriate spatial weighting matrix in the context of a spatial quantile regression model. This selection is a notoriously difficult problem even in linear spatial models and is even more difficult in a quantile regression setup. The proposal is illustrated by an empirical example and manages to produce tractable models. One important feature of the proposed methodology is that by allowing different degrees and forms of spatial dependence across quantiles it further relaxes the usual quantile restriction attributable to the linear quantile regression. In this way we can obtain a more robust, with regard to potential functional misspecification, model, but nevertheless preserve the parametric rate of convergence and the established inferential apparatus associated with the linear quantile regression approach
Fast calibrated additive quantile regression
We propose a novel framework for fitting additive quantile regression models,
which provides well calibrated inference about the conditional quantiles and
fast automatic estimation of the smoothing parameters, for model structures as
diverse as those usable with distributional GAMs, while maintaining equivalent
numerical efficiency and stability. The proposed methods are at once
statistically rigorous and computationally efficient, because they are based on
the general belief updating framework of Bissiri et al. (2016) to loss based
inference, but compute by adapting the stable fitting methods of Wood et al.
(2016). We show how the pinball loss is statistically suboptimal relative to a
novel smooth generalisation, which also gives access to fast estimation
methods. Further, we provide a novel calibration method for efficiently
selecting the 'learning rate' balancing the loss with the smoothing priors
during inference, thereby obtaining reliable quantile uncertainty estimates.
Our work was motivated by a probabilistic electricity load forecasting
application, used here to demonstrate the proposed approach. The methods
described here are implemented by the qgam R package, available on the
Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN)
On kernel smoothing for extremal quantile regression
Nonparametric regression quantiles obtained by inverting a kernel estimator
of the conditional distribution of the response are long established in
statistics. Attention has been, however, restricted to ordinary quantiles
staying away from the tails of the conditional distribution. The purpose of
this paper is to extend their asymptotic theory far enough into the tails. We
focus on extremal quantile regression estimators of a response variable given a
vector of covariates in the general setting, whether the conditional
extreme-value index is positive, negative, or zero. Specifically, we elucidate
their limit distributions when they are located in the range of the data or
near and even beyond the sample boundary, under technical conditions that link
the speed of convergence of their (intermediate or extreme) order with the
oscillations of the quantile function and a von-Mises property of the
conditional distribution. A simulation experiment and an illustration on real
data were presented. The real data are the American electric data where the
estimation of conditional extremes is found to be of genuine interest.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.3150/12-BEJ466 the Bernoulli
(http://isi.cbs.nl/bernoulli/) by the International Statistical
Institute/Bernoulli Society (http://isi.cbs.nl/BS/bshome.htm
Selecting the number of principal components: estimation of the true rank of a noisy matrix
Principal component analysis (PCA) is a well-known tool in multivariate
statistics. One significant challenge in using PCA is the choice of the number
of components. In order to address this challenge, we propose an exact
distribution-based method for hypothesis testing and construction of confidence
intervals for signals in a noisy matrix. Assuming Gaussian noise, we use the
conditional distribution of the singular values of a Wishart matrix and derive
exact hypothesis tests and confidence intervals for the true signals. Our paper
is based on the approach of Taylor, Loftus and Tibshirani (2013) for testing
the global null: we generalize it to test for any number of principal
components, and derive an integrated version with greater power. In simulation
studies we find that our proposed methods compare well to existing approaches.Comment: 29 pages, 9 figures, 4 table
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