Abstract
We study the conditional distribution of low-dimensional projections from high-dimensional data, where the conditioning is on other low-dimensional projections. To fix ideas, consider a random $d$-vector $Z$ that has a Lebesgue density and that is standardized so that $\mathbb{E} Z=0$ and $\mathbb{E} ZZ'=I_{d}$. Moreover, consider two projections defined by unit-vectors $\alpha$ and $\beta$, namely a response $y=\alpha'Z$ and an explanatory variable $x=\beta'Z$. It has long been known that the conditional mean of $y$ given $x$ is approximately linear in $x$, under some regularity conditions; cf. Hall and Li [Ann. Statist. 21 (1993) 867–889]. However, a corresponding result for the conditional variance has not been available so far. We here show that the conditional variance of $y$ given $x$ is approximately constant in $x$ (again, under some regularity conditions). These results hold uniformly in $\alpha$ and for most $\beta$’s, provided only that the dimension of $Z$ is large. In that sense, we see that most linear submodels of a high-dimensional overall model are approximately correct. Our findings provide new insights in a variety of modeling scenarios. We discuss several examples, including sliced inverse regression, sliced average variance estimation, generalized linear models under potential link violation, and sparse linear modeling.
Citation
Hannes Leeb. "On the conditional distributions of low-dimensional projections from high-dimensional data." Ann. Statist. 41 (2) 464 - 483, April 2013. https://doi.org/10.1214/12-AOS1081
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