Fitting high-dimensional statistical models often requires the use of non-linear parameter estimation procedures. As a consequence, it is generally impossible to obtain an exact characterization of the probability distribution of the parameter estimates. This in turn implies that it is extremely challenging to quantify the associated with a certain parameter estimate. Concretely, no commonly accepted procedure exists for computing classical measures of uncertainty and statistical significance as confidence intervals or @math -values for these models. We consider here high-dimensional linear regression problem, and propose an efficient algorithm for constructing confidence intervals and @math -values. The resulting confidence intervals have nearly optimal size. When testing for the null hypothesis that a certain parameter is vanishing, our method has nearly optimal power. Our approach is based on constructing a de-biased' version of regularized M-estimators. The new construction improves over recent work in the field in that it does not assume a special structure on the design matrix. We test our method on synthetic data and a high-throughput genomic data set about riboflavin production rate.
@cite_27: High-dimensional statistical inference deals with models in which the the number of parameters p is comparable to or larger than the sample size n. Since it is usually impossible to obtain consistent procedures unless @math , a line of recent work has studied models with various types of low-dimensional structure, including sparse vectors, sparse and structured matrices, low-rank matrices and combinations thereof. In such settings, a general approach to estimation is to solve a regularized optimization problem, which combines a loss function measuring how well the model fits the data with some regularization function that encourages the assumed structure. This paper provides a unified framework for establishing consistency and convergence rates for such regularized M-estimators under high-dimensional scaling. We state one main theorem and show how it can be used to re-derive some existing results, and also to obtain a number of new results on consistency and convergence rates, in both @math -error and related norms. Our analysis also identifies two key properties of loss and regularization functions, referred to as restricted strong convexity and decomposability, that ensure corresponding regularized M-estimators have fast convergence rates and which are optimal in many well-studied cases.
@cite_31: We propose a method for constructing p-values for general hypotheses in a high-dimensional linear model. The hypotheses can be local for testing a single regression parameter or they may be more global involving several up to all parameters. Furthermore, when considering many hypotheses, we show how to adjust for multiple testing taking dependence among the p-values into account. Our technique is based on Ridge estimation with an additional correction term due to a substantial projection bias in high dimensions. We prove strong error control for our p-values and provide sufficient conditions for detection: for the former, we do not make any assumption on the size of the true underlying regression coefficients while regarding the latter, our procedure might not be optimal in terms of power. We demonstrate the method in simulated examples and a real data application.
@cite_32: The purpose of this paper is to propose methodologies for statistical inference of low-dimensional parameters with high-dimensional data. We focus on constructing confidence intervals for individual coefficients and linear combinations of several of them in a linear regression model, although our ideas are applicable in a much broad context. The theoretical results presented here provide sufficient conditions for the asymptotic normality of the proposed estimators along with a consistent estimator for their finite-dimensional covariance matrices. These sufficient conditions allow the number of variables to far exceed the sample size. The simulation results presented here demonstrate the accuracy of the coverage probability of the proposed confidence intervals, strongly supporting the theoretical results.
@cite_35: We consider linear regression in the high-dimensional regime where the number of observations @math is smaller than the number of parameters @math . A very successful approach in this setting uses @math -penalized least squares (a.k.a. the Lasso) to search for a subset of @math parameters that best explain the data, while setting the other parameters to zero. Considerable amount of work has been devoted to characterizing the estimation and model selection problems within this approach. In this paper we consider instead the fundamental, but far less understood, question of . More precisely, we address the problem of computing p-values for single regression coefficients. On one hand, we develop a general upper bound on the minimax power of tests with a given significance level. On the other, we prove that this upper bound is (nearly) achievable through a practical procedure in the case of random design matrices with independent entries. Our approach is based on a debiasing of the Lasso estimator. The analysis builds on a rigorous characterization of the asymptotic distribution of the Lasso estimator and its debiased version. Our result holds for optimal sample size, i.e., when @math is at least on the order of @math . We generalize our approach to random design matrices with i.i.d. Gaussian rows @math . In this case we prove that a similar distributional characterization (termed standard distributional limit') holds for @math much larger than @math . Finally, we show that for optimal sample size, @math being at least of order @math , the standard distributional limit for general Gaussian designs can be derived from the replica heuristics in statistical physics.
The problem of quantifying statistical significance in high-dimensional parameter estimation is, by comparison, far less understood. Zhang and Zhang @cite_32 , and B "uhlmann @cite_31 proposed hypothesis testing procedures under restricted eigenvalue or compatibility conditions @cite_27 . These papers provide deterministic guarantees but --in order to achieve a certain target significance level @math and power @math -- they require @math . The best lower bound @cite_35 shows that any such test requires instead @math . (The lower bound of @cite_35 is reproduced as Theorem here, for the reader's convenience.)