Performing statistical inference in high-dimension is an outstanding challenge. A major source of difficulty is the absence of precise information on the distribution of high-dimensional estimators. Here, we consider linear regression in the high-dimensional regime @math . In this context, we would like to perform inference on a high-dimensional parameters vector @math . Important progress has been achieved in computing confidence intervals for single coordinates @math . A key role in these new methods is played by a certain debiased estimator @math that is constructed from the Lasso. Earlier work establishes that, under suitable assumptions on the design matrix, the coordinates of @math are asymptotically Gaussian provided @math is @math -sparse with @math . The condition @math is stronger than the one for consistent estimation, namely @math . We study Gaussian designs with known or unknown population covariance. When the covariance is known, we prove that the debiased estimator is asymptotically Gaussian under the nearly optimal condition @math . Note that earlier work was limited to @math even for perfectly known covariance. The same conclusion holds if the population covariance is unknown but can be estimated sufficiently well, e.g. under the same sparsity conditions on the inverse covariance as assumed by earlier work. For intermediate regimes, we describe the trade-off between sparsity in the coefficients and in the inverse covariance of the design. We further discuss several applications of our results to high-dimensional inference. In particular, we propose a new estimator that is minimax optimal up to a factor @math for i.i.d. Gaussian designs.
The focus of the present paper is assessing statistical significance, such as confidence intervals, for single coordinates in the parameters vector @math and more generally for small groups of coordinates. Other inference tasks are also interesting and challenging in high-dimension, and were the object of recent investigations @cite_56 @cite_58 @cite_14 @cite_27 .
@cite_14 @cite_27 @cite_58 @cite_56
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We consider linear regression in the high-dimensional regime in which the number of observations n is smaller than the number of parameters p. A very successful approach in this setting uses 1-penalized least squares (a.k.a. the Lasso) to search for a subset of s0 < n parameters that best explain the data, while setting the other parameters to zero. A 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 statistical significance. We study this problem under the random design model in which the rows of the design matrix are i.i.d. and drawn from a high-dimensional Gaussian distribution. This situation arises, for instance, in learning high-dimensional Gaussian graphical models. Leveraging on an asymptotic distributional characterization of regularized least squares estimators, we develop a procedure for computing p-values and hence assessing statistical significance for hypothesis testing. We characterize the statistical power of this procedure, and evaluate it on synthetic and real data, comparing it with earlier proposals. Finally, we provide an upper bound on the minimax power of tests with a given significance level and show that our proposed procedure achieves this bound in case of design matrices with i.i.d. Gaussian entries. 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. Statistical inference and information processing of high-dimensional data often require an efficient and accurate estimation of their second-order statistics. With rapidly changing data, limited processing power and storage at the acquisition devices, it is desirable to extract the covariance structure from a single pass over the data and a small number of stored measurements. In this paper, we explore a quadratic (or rank-one) measurement model which imposes minimal memory requirements and low computational complexity during the sampling process, and is shown to be optimal in preserving various low-dimensional covariance structures. Specifically, four popular structural assumptions of covariance matrices, namely, low rank, Toeplitz low rank, sparsity, jointly rank-one and sparse structure, are investigated, while recovery is achieved via convex relaxation paradigms for the respective structure. The proposed quadratic sampling framework has a variety of potential applications, including streaming data processing, high-frequency wireless communication, phase space tomography and phase retrieval in optics, and noncoherent subspace detection. Our method admits universally accurate covariance estimation in the absence of noise, as soon as the number of measurements exceeds the information theoretic limits. We also demonstrate the robustness of this approach against noise and imperfect structural assumptions. Our analysis is established upon a novel notion called the mixed-norm restricted isometry property (RIP- @math ), as well as the conventional RIP- @math for near-isotropic and bounded measurements. In addition, our results improve upon the best-known phase retrieval (including both dense and sparse signals) guarantees using PhaseLift with a significantly simpler approach. 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.