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We propose a method of least squares approximation (LSA) for unified yet simple LASSO estimation. Our general theoretical framework includes ordinary least squares, generalized linear models, quantile regression, and many others as special cases. Specifically, LSA can transfer many different types of LASSO objective functions into their asymptotically equivalent least squares problems. Thereafter, the standard asymptotic theory can be established and the LARS algorithm can be applied. In particular, if the adaptive LASSO penalty and a Bayes information criterion-type tuning parameter selector are used, the resulting LSA estimator can be as efficient as the oracle. Extensive numerical studies confirm our theory.

We propose penalized empirical likelihood for parameter estimation and variable selection for problems with diverging numbers of parameters. Our results are demonstrated for estimating the mean vector in multivariate analysis and regression coefficients in linear models. By using an appropriate penalty function, we showthat penalized empirical likelihood has the oracle property. That is, with probability tending to 1, penalized empirical likelihood identifies the true model and estimates the nonzero coefficients as efficiently as if the sparsity of the true model was known in advance. The advantage of penalized empirical likelihood as a nonparametric likelihood approach is illustrated by testing hypotheses and constructing confidence regions. Numerical simulations confirm our theoretical findings.

Contemporary statistical research frequently deals with problems involving a diverging number of parameters. For those problems, various shrinkage methods (e.g. the lasso and smoothly clipped absolute deviation) are found to be particularly useful for variable selection. Nevertheless, the desirable performances of those shrinkage methods heavily hinge on an appropriate selection of the tuning parameters. With a fixed predictor dimension, Wang and co-worker have demonstrated that the tuning parameters selected by a Bayesian information criterion type criterion can identify the true model consistently. In this work, similar results are further extended to the situation with a diverging number of parameters for both unpenalized and penalized estimators. Consequently, our theoretical results further enlarge not only the scope of applicabilityation criterion type criteria but also that of those shrinkage estimation methods.

When a parametric likelihood function is not specified for a model, estimating equations may provide an instrument for statistical inference. Qin and Lawless (1994) illustrated that empirical likelihood makes optimal use of these equations in inferences for fixed low-dimensional unknown parameters. In this paper, we study empirical likelihood for general estimating equations with growing high dimensionality and propose a penalized empirical likelihood approach for parameter estimation and variable selection. We quantify the asymptotic properties of empirical likelihood and its penalized version, and show that penalized empirical likelihood has the oracle property. The performance of the proposed method is illustrated via simulated applications and a data analysis.

We propose new regression models for parameterizing covariance structures in longitudinal data analysis. Using a novel Cholesky factor, the entries in this decomposition have a moving average and log-innovation interpretation and are modelled as linear functions of covariates. We propose efficient maximum likelihood estimates for joint mean-covariance analysis based on this decomposition and derive the asymptotic distributions of the coefficient estimates. Furthermore, we study a local search algorithm, computationally more efficient than traditional all subset selection, based on BIC for model selection, and show its model selection consistency. Thus, a conjecture of Pan & MacKenzie (2003) is verified. We demonstrate the finite-sample performance of the method via analysis of data on CD4 trajectories and through simulations.

Variable selection is a challenging issue in statistical applications when the number of predictors p far exceeds the number of observations n. In this ultrahigh dimensional setting, the sure independence screening procedure was introduced to reduce the dimensionality significantly by preserving the true model with overwhelming probability, before a refined second-stage analysis. However, the aforementioned sure screening property strongly relies on the assumption that the important variables in the model have large marginal correlations with the response, which rarely holds in reality. To overcome this, we propose a novel and simple screening technique called high dimensional ordinary least squares projection which we refer to as 'HOLP'. We show that HOLP has the sure screening property and gives consistent variable selection without the strong correlation assumption, and it has a low computational complexity. A ridge-type HOLP procedure is also discussed. Simulation study shows that HOLP performs competitively compared with many other marginal correlation-based methods. An application to a mammalian eye disease data set illustrates the attractiveness of HOLP.

We propose a novel quantile regression approach for longitudinal data analysis which naturally incorporates auxiliary information from the conditional mean model to account for within-subject correlations. The efficiency gain is quantified theoretically and demonstrated empirically via simulation studies and the analysis of a real dataset.

An important consideration for variable selection in interaction models is to design an appropriate penalty that respects hierarchy of the importance of the variables. A common theme is to include an interaction term only after the corresponding main effects are present. In this paper, we study several recently proposed approaches and present a unified analysis on the convergence rate for a class of estimators, when the design satisfies the restricted eigenvalue condition. In particular, we show that with probability tending to one, the resulting estimates have a rate of convergence s $\\sqrt {\\log {p_1}/n} $ in the ℓ₁ error, where p₁ is the ambient dimension, s is the true dimension and n is the sample size. We give a new proof that the restricted eigenvalue condition holds with high probability, when the variables in the main effects and the errors follow sub-Gaussian distributions. Under this setup, the interactions no longer follow Gaussian or sub-Gaussian distributions even if the main effects follow Gaussian, and thus existing works are not applicable. This result is of independent interest.

Diversity in human capital is widely seen as critical to creating holistic and high-quality research, especially in areas that engage with diverse cultures, environments, and challenges. Quantification of diverse academic collaborations and their effect on research quality is lacking, especially at international scale and across different domains. Here, we present the first effort to measure the impact of geographic diversity in coauthorships on the citation of their papers across different academic domains. Our results unequivocally show that geographic coauthor diversity improves paper citation, but very long distance collaborations have variable impact. We also discover “well-trodden” collaboration circles that yield much less impact than similar travel distances. These relationships are observed to exist across different subject areas, but with varying strengths. These findings can help academics identify new opportunities from a diversity perspective, as well as inform funders on areas that require additional mobility support.

An important problem in contemporary statistics is to understand the relationship among a large number of variables based on a dataset, usually with p, the number of the variables, much larger than n, the sample size. Recent efforts have focused on modeling static covariance matrices where pairwise covariances are considered invariant. In many real systems, however, these pairwise relations often change. To characterize the changing correlations in a high-dimensional system, we study a class of dynamic covariance models (DCMs) assumed to be sparse, and investigate for the first time a unified theory for understanding their nonasymptotic error rates and model selection properties. In particular, in the challenging high-dimensional regime, we highlight a new uniform consistency theory in which the sample size can be seen as n 4/5 when the bandwidth parameter is chosen as h∝n − 1/5 for accounting for the dynamics. We show that this result holds uniformly over a range of the variable used for modeling the dynamics. The convergence rate bears the mark of the familiar bias-variance trade-off in the kernel smoothing literature. We illustrate the results with simulations and the analysis of a neuroimaging dataset. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.