Search results for "variance"
showing 10 items of 2030 documents
Absolute Risk and Loss-of-Lifetime Estimates for Quantitative Risk Assessment
1998
Quantitative risk assessments in public health settings intend to describe the hazard of a specific exposure in a given population on the basis of epidemiological and/or experimental results. Two different risk quantities, the absolute lifetime excess risk and the loss-of-lifetime, which differ in their definition of hazard, are discussed and compared. For both measures estimation procedures are derived and the relationship between the various estimates which are currently in use are investigated. It is shown that the two most common estimators can be written as special cases of a more general concept. This leads to conclusions about the assumptions on which different estimation procedures …
Establishing some order amongst exact approximations of MCMCs
2016
Exact approximations of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms are a general emerging class of sampling algorithms. One of the main ideas behind exact approximations consists of replacing intractable quantities required to run standard MCMC algorithms, such as the target probability density in a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, with estimators. Perhaps surprisingly, such approximations lead to powerful algorithms which are exact in the sense that they are guaranteed to have correct limiting distributions. In this paper we discover a general framework which allows one to compare, or order, performance measures of two implementations of such algorithms. In particular, we establish an order …
Horvitz-Thompson estimators for functional data: asymptotic confidence bands and optimal allocation for stratified sampling
2009
When dealing with very large datasets of functional data, survey sampling approaches are useful in order to obtain estimators of simple functional quantities, without being obliged to store all the data. We propose here a Horvitz--Thompson estimator of the mean trajectory. In the context of a superpopulation framework, we prove under mild regularity conditions that we obtain uniformly consistent estimators of the mean function and of its variance function. With additional assumptions on the sampling design we state a functional Central Limit Theorem and deduce asymptotic confidence bands. Stratified sampling is studied in detail, and we also obtain a functional version of the usual optimal …
Can the Adaptive Metropolis Algorithm Collapse Without the Covariance Lower Bound?
2011
The Adaptive Metropolis (AM) algorithm is based on the symmetric random-walk Metropolis algorithm. The proposal distribution has the following time-dependent covariance matrix at step $n+1$ \[ S_n = Cov(X_1,...,X_n) + \epsilon I, \] that is, the sample covariance matrix of the history of the chain plus a (small) constant $\epsilon>0$ multiple of the identity matrix $I$. The lower bound on the eigenvalues of $S_n$ induced by the factor $\epsilon I$ is theoretically convenient, but practically cumbersome, as a good value for the parameter $\epsilon$ may not always be easy to choose. This article considers variants of the AM algorithm that do not explicitly bound the eigenvalues of $S_n$ away …
Importance sampling correction versus standard averages of reversible MCMCs in terms of the asymptotic variance
2017
We establish an ordering criterion for the asymptotic variances of two consistent Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) estimators: an importance sampling (IS) estimator, based on an approximate reversible chain and subsequent IS weighting, and a standard MCMC estimator, based on an exact reversible chain. Essentially, we relax the criterion of the Peskun type covariance ordering by considering two different invariant probabilities, and obtain, in place of a strict ordering of asymptotic variances, a bound of the asymptotic variance of IS by that of the direct MCMC. Simple examples show that IS can have arbitrarily better or worse asymptotic variance than Metropolis-Hastings and delayed-acceptanc…
Confidence bands for Horvitz-Thompson estimators using sampled noisy functional data
2013
When collections of functional data are too large to be exhaustively observed, survey sampling techniques provide an effective way to estimate global quantities such as the population mean function. Assuming functional data are collected from a finite population according to a probabilistic sampling scheme, with the measurements being discrete in time and noisy, we propose to first smooth the sampled trajectories with local polynomials and then estimate the mean function with a Horvitz-Thompson estimator. Under mild conditions on the population size, observation times, regularity of the trajectories, sampling scheme, and smoothing bandwidth, we prove a Central Limit theorem in the space of …
A note on adjusted responses, fitted values and residuals in Generalized Linear Models
2014
Adjusted responses, adjusted fitted values and adjusted residuals are known to play in Generalized Linear Models the role played in Linear Models by observations, fitted values and ordinary residuals. We think this parallelism, which was widely recognized and used in the early literature on Generalized Linear Models, has been somewhat overlooked in more recent presentations. We revise this parallelism, systematizing and proving some results that are either scattered or not satisfactorily spelled out in the literature. In particular, we formally derive the asymptotic dispersion matrix of the (scaled) adjusted residuals, by proving that in Generalized Linear Models the fitted values are asym…
Change-points detection for variance piecewise constant models
2011
A new approach based on the fit of a generalized linear regression model is introduced for detecting change-points in the variance of heteroscedastic Gaussian variables, with piecewise constant variance function. This approach overcome some limitations of both exact and approximate well-known methods that are based on successive application of search and tend to overestimate the real number of changes in the variance of the series. The proposed method just requires the computation of a gamma GLM with log-link, resulting in a very efficient algorithm even with large sample size and many change points to be estimated.
Differential geometric least angle regression: a differential geometric approach to sparse generalized linear models
2013
Summary Sparsity is an essential feature of many contemporary data problems. Remote sensing, various forms of automated screening and other high throughput measurement devices collect a large amount of information, typically about few independent statistical subjects or units. In certain cases it is reasonable to assume that the underlying process generating the data is itself sparse, in the sense that only a few of the measured variables are involved in the process. We propose an explicit method of monotonically decreasing sparsity for outcomes that can be modelled by an exponential family. In our approach we generalize the equiangular condition in a generalized linear model. Although the …
A differential-geometric approach to generalized linear models with grouped predictors
2016
We propose an extension of the differential-geometric least angle regression method to perform sparse group inference in a generalized linear model. An efficient algorithm is proposed to compute the solution curve. The proposed group differential-geometric least angle regression method has important properties that distinguish it from the group lasso. First, its solution curve is based on the invariance properties of a generalized linear model. Second, it adds groups of variables based on a group equiangularity condition, which is shown to be related to score statistics. An adaptive version, which includes weights based on the Kullback-Leibler divergence, improves its variable selection fea…