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We present a new class of methods for high dimensional non-parametric regression and classification called sparse additive models. Our methods combine ideas from sparse linear modelling and additive non-parametric regression. We derive an algorithm for fitting the models that is practical and effective even when the number of covariates is larger than the sample size. Sparse additive models are essentially a functional version of the grouped lasso of Yuan and Lin. They are also closely related to the COSSO model of Lin and Zhang but decouple smoothing and sparsity, enabling the use of arbitrary non-parametric smoothers. We give an analysis of the theoretical properties of sparse additive models and present empirical results on synthetic and real data, showing that they can be effective in fitting sparse non-parametric models in high dimensional data. Copyright (c) 2009 Royal Statistical Society.

We develop a general framework for distribution-free predictive inference in regression, using conformal inference. The proposed methodology allows for the construction of a prediction band for the response variable using any estimator of the regression function. The resulting prediction band preserves the consistency properties of the original estimator under standard assumptions, while guaranteeing finite-sample marginal coverage even when these assumptions do not hold. We analyze and compare, both empirically and theoretically, the two major variants of our conformal framework: full conformal inference and split conformal inference, along with a related jackknife method. These methods offer different tradeoffs between statistical accuracy (length of resulting prediction intervals) and computational efficiency. As extensions, we develop a method for constructing valid in-sample prediction intervals called rank-one-out conformal inference, which has essentially the same computational efficiency as split conformal inference. We also describe an extension of our procedures for producing prediction bands with locally varying length, in order to adapt to heteroskedascity in the data. Finally, we propose a model-free notion of variable importance, called leave-one-covariate-out or LOCO inference. Accompanying this paper is an R package conformalInference that implements all of the proposals we have introduced. In the spirit of reproducibility, all of our empirical results can also be easily (re)generated using this package.

This paper explores the following question: what kind of statistical guarantees can be given when doing variable selection in high dimensional models? In particular, we look at the error rates and power of some multi-stage regression methods. In the first stage we fit a set of candidate models. In the second stage we select one model by cross-validation. In the third stage we use hypothesis testing to eliminate some variables. We refer to the first two stages as “screening” and the last stage as “cleaning.” We consider three screening methods: the lasso, marginal regression, and forward stepwise regression. Our method gives consistent variable selection under certain conditions.

We investigate the operating characteristics of the Benjamini-Hochberg false discovery rate procedure for multiple testing. This is a distribution-free method that controls the expected fraction of falsely rejected null hypotheses among those rejected. The paper provides a framework for understanding more about this procedure. We first study the asymptotic properties of the `deciding point' "D" that determines the critical "p"-value. From this, we obtain explicit asymptotic expressions for a particular risk function. We introduce the dual notion of false non-rejections and we consider a risk function that combines the false discovery rate and false non-rejections. We also consider the optimal procedure with respect to a measure of conditional risk. Copyright 2002 Royal Statistical Society.

All of statistics: a concise course in statistica! inference 1 Larry a. W asserman.p. cm. -(Springer texts in statistics) Includes bibliographical references and index.

We propose a semiparametric approach called the nonparanormal skeptic for efficiently and robustly estimating high dimensional undirected graphical models. To achieve modeling flexibility, we consider the nonparanormal graphical models proposed by Liu, Lafferty and Wasserman (2009). To achieve estimation robustness, we exploit nonparametric rank-based correlation coefficient estimators, including the Spearman's rho and Kendall's tau. We prove that the nonparanormal skeptic achieves the optimal parametric rates of convergence for both graph recovery and parameter estimation. This result suggests that the nonparanormal graphical models can be used as a safe replacement of the popular Gaussian graphical models, even when the data are truly Gaussian. Besides theoretical analysis, we also conduct thorough numerical simulations to compare the graph recovery performance of different estimators under both ideal and noisy settings. The proposed methods are then applied on a largescale genomic dataset to illustrate their empirical usefulness. The R package huge implementing the proposed methods is available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network: http://cran.r-project.org/.

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