Researchers are often interested in drawing inferences regarding the order between two experimental groups on the basis of multivariate response data. Since standard multivariate methods are designed for two-sided alternatives, they may not be ideal for testing for order between two groups. In this article we introduce the notion of the linear stochastic order and investigate its properties. Statistical theory and methodology are developed to both estimate the direction which best separates two arbitrary ordered distributions and to test for order between the two groups. The new methodology generalizes Roy’s classical largest root test to the nonparametric setting and is applicable to random vectors with discrete and/or continuous components. The proposed methodology is illustrated using data obtained from a 90-day pre-chronic rodent cancer bioassay study conducted by the National Toxicology Program (NTP).

While adaptive sensing has provided improved rates of convergence in sparse regression and classification, results in nonparametric regression have so far been restricted to quite specific classes of functions. In this paper, we describe an adaptive-sensing algorithm which is applicable to general nonparametric-regression problems. The algorithm is spatially adaptive, and achieves improved rates of convergence over spatially inhomogeneous functions. Over standard function classes, it likewise retains the spatial adaptivity properties of a uniform design.

Subject dropout is very common in practical applications of crossover designs. However, there is very limited design literature taking this into account. Optimality results have not yet been well established due to the complexity of the problem. This paper establishes feasible, as well as necessary and sufficient conditions for a crossover design to be universally optimal in approximate design theory in the presence of subject dropout. These conditions are essentially linear equations with respect to proportions of all possible treatment sequences being applied to subjects and hence they can be easily solved. A general algorithm is proposed to derive exact designs which are shown to be efficient and robust.

We analyze the convergence rate of a simplified version of a popular Gibbs sampling method used for statistical discovery of gene regulatory binding motifs in DNA sequences. This sampler satisfies a very strong form of ergodicity (uniform). However, we show that, due to multimodality of the posterior distribution, the rate of convergence often decreases exponentially as a function of the length of the DNA sequence. Specifically, we show that this occurs whenever there is more than one true repeating pattern in the data. In practice there are typically multiple such patterns in biological data, the goal being to detect the most well-conserved and frequently-occurring of these. Our findings match empirical results, in which the motif-discovery Gibbs sampler has exhibited such poor convergence that it is used only for finding modes of the posterior distribution (candidate motifs) rather than for obtaining samples from that distribution. Ours are some of the first meaningful bounds on the convergence rate of a Markov chain method for sampling from a multimodal posterior distribution, as a function of statistical quantities like the number of observations.

This article presents an algorithm that generates a conservative confidence interval of a specified length and coverage probability for the power of a Monte Carlo test (such as a bootstrap or permutation test). It is the first method that achieves this aim for almost any Monte Carlo test. Previous research has focused on obtaining as accurate a result as possible for a fixed computational effort, without providing a guaranteed precision in the above sense. The algorithm we propose does not have a fixed effort and runs until a confidence interval with a user-specified length and coverage probability can be constructed. We show that the expected effort required by the algorithm is finite in most cases of practical interest, including situations where the distribution of the $p$-value is absolutely continuous or discrete with finite support. The algorithm is implemented in the R-package simctest, available on CRAN.

In the common linear regression model the problem of determining optimal designs for least squares estimation is considered in the case where the observations are correlated. A necessary condition for the optimality of a given design is provided, which extends the classical equivalence theory for optimal designs in models with uncorrelated errors to the case of dependent data. If the regression functions are eigenfunctions of an integral operator defined by the covariance kernel, it is shown that the corresponding measure defines a universally optimal design. For several models universally optimal designs can be identified explicitly. In particular, it is proved that the uniform distribution is universally optimal for a class of trigonometric regression models with a broad class of covariance kernels and that the arcsine distribution is universally optimal for the polynomial regression model with correlation structure defined by the logarithmic potential. To the best knowledge of the authors these findings provide the first explicit results on optimal designs for regression models with correlated observations, which are not restricted to the location scale model.

We give answer to an open problem regarding consistency of the maximum likelihood estimators (MLEs) in generalized linear mixed models (GLMMs) involving crossed random effects. The solution to the open problem introduces an interesting, nonstandard approach to proving consistency of the MLEs in cases of dependent observations. Using the new technique, we extend the results to MLEs under a general GLMM. An example is used to further illustrate the technique.

The causal inference literature has provided a clear formal definition of confounding expressed in terms of counterfactual independence. The literature has not, however, come to any consensus on a formal definition of a confounder, as it has given priority to the concept of confounding over that of a confounder. We consider a number of candidate definitions arising from various more informal statements made in the literature. We consider the properties satisfied by each candidate definition, principally focusing on (i) whether under the candidate definition control for all “confounders” suffices to control for “confounding” and (ii) whether each confounder in some context helps eliminate or reduce confounding bias. Several of the candidate definitions do not have these two properties. Only one candidate definition of those considered satisfies both properties. We propose that a “confounder” be defined as a pre-exposure covariate $C$ for which there exists a set of other covariates $X$ such that effect of the exposure on the outcome is unconfounded conditional on $(X,C)$ but such that for no proper subset of $(X,C)$ is the effect of the exposure on the outcome unconfounded given the subset. We also provide a conditional analogue of the above definition; and we propose a variable that helps reduce bias but not eliminate bias be referred to as a “surrogate confounder.” These definitions are closely related to those given by Robins and Morgenstern [Comput. Math. Appl. 14 (1987) 869–916]. The implications that hold among the various candidate definitions are discussed.

In this paper we introduce a general theory for nonlinear sufficient dimension reduction, and explore its ramifications and scope. This theory subsumes recent work employing reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces, and reveals many parallels between linear and nonlinear sufficient dimension reduction. Using these parallels we analyze the properties of existing methods and develop new ones. We begin by characterizing dimension reduction at the general level of $\sigma$-fields and proceed to that of classes of functions, leading to the notions of sufficient, complete and central dimension reduction classes. We show that, when it exists, the complete and sufficient class coincides with the central class, and can be unbiasedly and exhaustively estimated by a generalized sliced inverse regression estimator (GSIR). When completeness does not hold, this estimator captures only part of the central class. However, in these cases we show that a generalized sliced average variance estimator (GSAVE) can capture a larger portion of the class. Both estimators require no numerical optimization because they can be computed by spectral decomposition of linear operators. Finally, we compare our estimators with existing methods by simulation and on actual data sets.

We develop an efficient estimation procedure for identifying and estimating the central subspace. Using a new way of parameterization, we convert the problem of identifying the central subspace to the problem of estimating a finite dimensional parameter in a semiparametric model. This conversion allows us to derive an efficient estimator which reaches the optimal semiparametric efficiency bound. The resulting efficient estimator can exhaustively estimate the central subspace without imposing any distributional assumptions. Our proposed efficient estimation also provides a possibility for making inference of parameters that uniquely identify the central subspace. We conduct simulation studies and a real data analysis to demonstrate the finite sample performance in comparison with several existing methods.

We develop asymptotic theory for weighted likelihood estimators (WLE) under two-phase stratified sampling without replacement. We also consider several variants of WLEs involving estimated weights and calibration. A set of empirical process tools are developed including a Glivenko–Cantelli theorem, a theorem for rates of convergence of $M$-estimators, and a Donsker theorem for the inverse probability weighted empirical processes under two-phase sampling and sampling without replacement at the second phase. Using these general results, we derive asymptotic distributions of the WLE of a finite-dimensional parameter in a general semiparametric model where an estimator of a nuisance parameter is estimable either at regular or nonregular rates. We illustrate these results and methods in the Cox model with right censoring and interval censoring. We compare the methods via their asymptotic variances under both sampling without replacement and the more usual (and easier to analyze) assumption of Bernoulli sampling at the second phase.

A Cramér moderate deviation theorem for Hotelling’s $T^{2}$-statistic is proved under a finite $(3+\delta)$th moment. The result is applied to large scale tests on the equality of mean vectors and is shown that the number of tests can be as large as $e^{o(n^{1/3})}$ before the chi-squared distribution calibration becomes inaccurate. As an application of the moderate deviation results, a global test on the equality of $m$ mean vectors based on the maximum of Hotelling’s $T^{2}$-statistics is developed and its asymptotic null distribution is shown to be an extreme value type I distribution. A novel intermediate approximation to the null distribution is proposed to improve the slow convergence rate of the extreme distribution approximation. Numerical studies show that the new test procedure works well even for a small sample size and performs favorably in analyzing a breast cancer dataset.

It is shown that the fiducial distribution in a group model, or more generally a quasigroup model, determines the optimal equivariant frequentist inference procedures. The proof does not rely on existence of invariant measures, and generalizes results corresponding to the choice of the right Haar measure as a Bayesian prior. Classical and more recent examples show that fiducial arguments can be used to give good candidates for exact or approximate confidence distributions. It is here suggested that the fiducial algorithm can be considered as an alternative to the Bayesian algorithm for the construction of good frequentist inference procedures more generally.

We introduce a quantile-adaptive framework for nonlinear variable screening with high-dimensional heterogeneous data. This framework has two distinctive features: (1) it allows the set of active variables to vary across quantiles, thus making it more flexible to accommodate heterogeneity; (2) it is model-free and avoids the difficult task of specifying the form of a statistical model in a high dimensional space. Our nonlinear independence screening procedure employs spline approximations to model the marginal effects at a quantile level of interest. Under appropriate conditions on the quantile functions without requiring the existence of any moments, the new procedure is shown to enjoy the sure screening property in ultra-high dimensions. Furthermore, the quantile-adaptive framework can naturally handle censored data arising in survival analysis. We prove that the sure screening property remains valid when the response variable is subject to random right censoring. Numerical studies confirm the fine performance of the proposed method for various semiparametric models and its effectiveness to extract quantile-specific information from heteroscedastic data.

This paper studies convergence behavior of latent mixing measures that arise in finite and infinite mixture models, using transportation distances (i.e., Wasserstein metrics). The relationship between Wasserstein distances on the space of mixing measures and $f$-divergence functionals such as Hellinger and Kullback–Leibler distances on the space of mixture distributions is investigated in detail using various identifiability conditions. Convergence in Wasserstein metrics for discrete measures implies convergence of individual atoms that provide support for the measures, thereby providing a natural interpretation of convergence of clusters in clustering applications where mixture models are typically employed. Convergence rates of posterior distributions for latent mixing measures are established, for both finite mixtures of multivariate distributions and infinite mixtures based on the Dirichlet process.