Group Lasso for high dimensional sparse quantile regression models

This paper studies the statistical properties of the group Lasso estimator for high dimensional sparse quantile regression models where the number of explanatory variables (or the number of groups of explanatory variables) is possibly much larger than the sample size while the number of variables in "active" groups is sufficiently small. We establish a non-asymptotic bound on the $\ell_{2}$-estimation error of the estimator. This bound explains situations under which the group Lasso estimator is potentially superior/inferior to the $\ell_{1}$-penalized quantile regression estimator in terms of the estimation error. We also propose a data-dependent choice of the tuning parameter to make the method more practical, by extending the original proposal of Belloni and Chernozhukov (2011) for the $\ell_{1}$-penalized quantile regression estimator. As an application, we analyze high dimensional additive quantile regression models. We show that under a set of suitable regularity conditions, the group Lasso estimator can attain the convergence rate arbitrarily close to the oracle rate. Finally, we conduct simulations experiments to examine our theoretical results.Comment: 37 pages. Some errors are correcte

Estimation in functional linear quantile regression

This paper studies estimation in functional linear quantile regression in which the dependent variable is scalar while the covariate is a function, and the conditional quantile for each fixed quantile index is modeled as a linear functional of the covariate. Here we suppose that covariates are discretely observed and sampling points may differ across subjects, where the number of measurements per subject increases as the sample size. Also, we allow the quantile index to vary over a given subset of the open unit interval, so the slope function is a function of two variables: (typically) time and quantile index. Likewise, the conditional quantile function is a function of the quantile index and the covariate. We consider an estimator for the slope function based on the principal component basis. An estimator for the conditional quantile function is obtained by a plug-in method. Since the so-constructed plug-in estimator not necessarily satisfies the monotonicity constraint with respect to the quantile index, we also consider a class of monotonized estimators for the conditional quantile function. We establish rates of convergence for these estimators under suitable norms, showing that these rates are optimal in a minimax sense under some smoothness assumptions on the covariance kernel of the covariate and the slope function. Empirical choice of the cutoff level is studied by using simulations.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/12-AOS1066 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Comparison and anti-concentration bounds for maxima of Gaussian random vectors

Slepian and Sudakov-Fernique type inequalities, which compare expectations of maxima of Gaussian random vectors under certain restrictions on the covariance matrices, play an important role in probability theory, especially in empirical process and extreme value theories. Here we give explicit comparisons of expectations of smooth functions and distribution functions of maxima of Gaussian random vectors without any restriction on the covariance matrices. We also establish an anti-concentration inequality for the maximum of a Gaussian random vector, which derives a useful upper bound on the L\'{e}vy concentration function for the Gaussian maximum. The bound is dimension-free and applies to vectors with arbitrary covariance matrices. This anti-concentration inequality plays a crucial role in establishing bounds on the Kolmogorov distance between maxima of Gaussian random vectors. These results have immediate applications in mathematical statistics. As an example of application, we establish a conditional multiplier central limit theorem for maxima of sums of independent random vectors where the dimension of the vectors is possibly much larger than the sample size.Comment: 22 pages; discussions and references update