Testability of high-dimensional linear models with nonsparse structures.

Understanding statistical inference under possibly non-sparse high-dimensional models has gained much interest recently. For a given component of the regression coefficient, we show that the difficulty of the problem depends on the sparsity of the corresponding row of the precision matrix of the covariates, not the sparsity of the regression coefficients. We develop new concepts of uniform and essentially uniform non-testability that allow the study of limitations of tests across a broad set of alternatives. Uniform non-testability identifies a collection of alternatives such that the power of any test, against any alternative in the group, is asymptotically at most equal to the nominal size. Implications of the new constructions include new minimax testability results that, in sharp contrast to the current results, do not depend on the sparsity of the regression parameters. We identify new tradeoffs between testability and feature correlation. In particular, we show that, in models with weak feature correlations, minimax lower bound can be attained by a test whose power has the n rate, regardless of the size of the model sparsity.

Penalized Composite Quasi-Likelihood for Ultrahigh-Dimensional Variable Selection.

In high-dimensional model selection problems, penalized least-square approaches have been extensively used. This paper addresses the question of both robustness and efficiency of penalized model selection methods, and proposes a data-driven weighted linear combination of convex loss functions, together with weighted L(1)-penalty. It is completely data-adaptive and does not require prior knowledge of the error distribution. The weighted L(1)-penalty is used both to ensure the convexity of the penalty term and to ameliorate the bias caused by the L(1)-penalty. In the setting with dimensionality much larger than the sample size, we establish a strong oracle property of the proposed method that possesses both the model selection consistency and estimation efficiency for the true non-zero coefficients. As specific examples, we introduce a robust method of composite L1-L2, and optimal composite quantile method and evaluate their performance in both simulated and real data examples.

REGULARIZATION FOR COX'S PROPORTIONAL HAZARDS MODEL WITH NP-DIMENSIONALITY.

High throughput genetic sequencing arrays with thousands of measurements per sample and a great amount of related censored clinical data have increased demanding need for better measurement specific model selection. In this paper we establish strong oracle properties of non-concave penalized methods for non-polynomial (NP) dimensional data with censoring in the framework of Cox's proportional hazards model. A class of folded-concave penalties are employed and both LASSO and SCAD are discussed specifically. We unveil the question under which dimensionality and correlation restrictions can an oracle estimator be constructed and grasped. It is demonstrated that non-concave penalties lead to significant reduction of the "irrepresentable condition" needed for LASSO model selection consistency. The large deviation result for martingales, bearing interests of its own, is developed for characterizing the strong oracle property. Moreover, the non-concave regularized estimator, is shown to achieve asymptotically the information bound of the oracle estimator. A coordinate-wise algorithm is developed for finding the grid of solution paths for penalized hazard regression problems, and its performance is evaluated on simulated and gene association study examples.