23,549 research outputs found
Estimation and confidence sets for sparse normal mixtures
For high dimensional statistical models, researchers have begun to focus on
situations which can be described as having relatively few moderately large
coefficients. Such situations lead to some very subtle statistical problems. In
particular, Ingster and Donoho and Jin have considered a sparse normal means
testing problem, in which they described the precise demarcation or detection
boundary. Meinshausen and Rice have shown that it is even possible to estimate
consistently the fraction of nonzero coordinates on a subset of the detectable
region, but leave unanswered the question of exactly in which parts of the
detectable region consistent estimation is possible. In the present paper we
develop a new approach for estimating the fraction of nonzero means for
problems where the nonzero means are moderately large. We show that the
detection region described by Ingster and Donoho and Jin turns out to be the
region where it is possible to consistently estimate the expected fraction of
nonzero coordinates. This theory is developed further and minimax rates of
convergence are derived. A procedure is constructed which attains the optimal
rate of convergence in this setting. Furthermore, the procedure also provides
an honest lower bound for confidence intervals while minimizing the expected
length of such an interval. Simulations are used to enable comparison with the
work of Meinshausen and Rice, where a procedure is given but where rates of
convergence have not been discussed. Extensions to more general Gaussian
mixture models are also given.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009053607000000334 the
Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Optimal inference in a class of regression models
We consider the problem of constructing confidence intervals (CIs) for a
linear functional of a regression function, such as its value at a point, the
regression discontinuity parameter, or a regression coefficient in a linear or
partly linear regression. Our main assumption is that the regression function
is known to lie in a convex function class, which covers most smoothness and/or
shape assumptions used in econometrics. We derive finite-sample optimal CIs and
sharp efficiency bounds under normal errors with known variance. We show that
these results translate to uniform (over the function class) asymptotic results
when the error distribution is not known. When the function class is
centrosymmetric, these efficiency bounds imply that minimax CIs are close to
efficient at smooth regression functions. This implies, in particular, that it
is impossible to form CIs that are tighter using data-dependent tuning
parameters, and maintain coverage over the whole function class. We specialize
our results to inference on the regression discontinuity parameter, and
illustrate them in simulations and an empirical application.Comment: 39 pages plus supplementary material
Minimizing Communication for Eigenproblems and the Singular Value Decomposition
Algorithms have two costs: arithmetic and communication. The latter
represents the cost of moving data, either between levels of a memory
hierarchy, or between processors over a network. Communication often dominates
arithmetic and represents a rapidly increasing proportion of the total cost, so
we seek algorithms that minimize communication. In \cite{BDHS10} lower bounds
were presented on the amount of communication required for essentially all
-like algorithms for linear algebra, including eigenvalue problems and
the SVD. Conventional algorithms, including those currently implemented in
(Sca)LAPACK, perform asymptotically more communication than these lower bounds
require. In this paper we present parallel and sequential eigenvalue algorithms
(for pencils, nonsymmetric matrices, and symmetric matrices) and SVD algorithms
that do attain these lower bounds, and analyze their convergence and
communication costs.Comment: 43 pages, 11 figure
An explicit Euler scheme with strong rate of convergence for financial SDEs with non-Lipschitz coefficients
We consider the approximation of stochastic differential equations (SDEs)
with non-Lipschitz drift or diffusion coefficients. We present a modified
explicit Euler-Maruyama discretisation scheme that allows us to prove strong
convergence, with a rate. Under some regularity and integrability conditions,
we obtain the optimal strong error rate. We apply this scheme to SDEs widely
used in the mathematical finance literature, including the
Cox-Ingersoll-Ross~(CIR), the 3/2 and the Ait-Sahalia models, as well as a
family of mean-reverting processes with locally smooth coefficients. We
numerically illustrate the strong convergence of the scheme and demonstrate its
efficiency in a multilevel Monte Carlo setting.Comment: 36 pages, 17 figures, 2 table
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