4,298 research outputs found
Covariance regularization by thresholding
This paper considers regularizing a covariance matrix of variables
estimated from observations, by hard thresholding. We show that the
thresholded estimate is consistent in the operator norm as long as the true
covariance matrix is sparse in a suitable sense, the variables are Gaussian or
sub-Gaussian, and , and obtain explicit rates. The results are
uniform over families of covariance matrices which satisfy a fairly natural
notion of sparsity. We discuss an intuitive resampling scheme for threshold
selection and prove a general cross-validation result that justifies this
approach. We also compare thresholding to other covariance estimators in
simulations and on an example from climate data.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/08-AOS600 the Annals of
Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical
Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Minimax bounds for sparse PCA with noisy high-dimensional data
We study the problem of estimating the leading eigenvectors of a
high-dimensional population covariance matrix based on independent Gaussian
observations. We establish a lower bound on the minimax risk of estimators
under the loss, in the joint limit as dimension and sample size increase
to infinity, under various models of sparsity for the population eigenvectors.
The lower bound on the risk points to the existence of different regimes of
sparsity of the eigenvectors. We also propose a new method for estimating the
eigenvectors by a two-stage coordinate selection scheme.Comment: 1 figur
Sparse PCA: Optimal rates and adaptive estimation
Principal component analysis (PCA) is one of the most commonly used
statistical procedures with a wide range of applications. This paper considers
both minimax and adaptive estimation of the principal subspace in the high
dimensional setting. Under mild technical conditions, we first establish the
optimal rates of convergence for estimating the principal subspace which are
sharp with respect to all the parameters, thus providing a complete
characterization of the difficulty of the estimation problem in term of the
convergence rate. The lower bound is obtained by calculating the local metric
entropy and an application of Fano's lemma. The rate optimal estimator is
constructed using aggregation, which, however, might not be computationally
feasible. We then introduce an adaptive procedure for estimating the principal
subspace which is fully data driven and can be computed efficiently. It is
shown that the estimator attains the optimal rates of convergence
simultaneously over a large collection of the parameter spaces. A key idea in
our construction is a reduction scheme which reduces the sparse PCA problem to
a high-dimensional multivariate regression problem. This method is potentially
also useful for other related problems.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/13-AOS1178 the Annals of
Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical
Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
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