Consider the following three important problems in statistical inference, namely, constructing confidence intervals for (1) the error of a high-dimensional ( @math ) regression estimator, (2) the linear regression noise level, and (3) the genetic signal-to-noise ratio of a continuous-valued trait (related to the heritability). All three problems turn out to be closely related to the little-studied problem of performing inference on the @math -norm of the signal in high-dimensional linear regression. We derive a novel procedure for this, which is asymptotically correct when the covariates are multivariate Gaussian and produces valid confidence intervals in finite samples as well. The procedure, called EigenPrism, is computationally fast and makes no assumptions on coefficient sparsity or knowledge of the noise level. We investigate the width of the EigenPrism confidence intervals, including a comparison with a Bayesian setting in which our interval is just 5 wider than the Bayes credible interval. We are then able to unify the three aforementioned problems by showing that the EigenPrism procedure with only minor modifications is able to make important contributions to all three. We also investigate the robustness of coverage and find that the method applies in practice and in finite samples much more widely than just the case of multivariate Gaussian covariates. Finally, we apply EigenPrism to a genetic dataset to estimate the genetic signal-to-noise ratio for a number of continuous phenotypes.
Inference for high-dimensional regression error, noise level, and genetic variance decomposition are each individually well-studied, so we review some relevant works here. To begin with, many authors have studied high-dimensional regression error for specific coefficient estimators, such as the Lasso , often providing conditions under which this regression error asymptotes to 0 (see for example @cite_18 @cite_4 ). To our knowledge the only author who has considered inference for a general estimator is @cite_15 , who does so using the Johnson--Lindenstrauss Lemma and assuming , that is, @math in the linear model . Thus the problem studied there is quite different from that addressed here, as we allow for noise in the linear model. Furthermore, because the Johnson--Lindenstrauss Lemma is not distribution-specific, it is conservative and thus Ward's bounds are in general conservative, while we will show that in most cases our CIs will be quite tight.
@cite_18 @cite_4 @cite_15
2162312215 2147631685 2949485285 2108394050
Methods based on l1-relaxation, such as basis pursuit and the Lasso, are very popular for sparse regression in high dimensions. The conditions for success of these methods are now well-understood: (1) exact recovery in the noiseless setting is possible if and only if the design matrix X satisfies the restricted nullspace property, and (2) the squared l2-error of a Lasso estimate decays at the minimax optimal rate k log p n, where k is the sparsity of the p-dimensional regression problem with additive Gaussian noise, whenever the design satisfies a restricted eigenvalue condition. The key issue is thus to determine when the design matrix X satisfies these desirable properties. Thus far, there have been numerous results showing that the restricted isometry property, which implies both the restricted nullspace and eigenvalue conditions, is satisfied when all entries of X are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.), or the rows are unitary. This paper proves directly that the restricted nullspace and eigenvalue conditions hold with high probability for quite general classes of Gaussian matrices for which the predictors may be highly dependent, and hence restricted isometry conditions can be violated with high probability. In this way, our results extend the attractive theoretical guarantees on l1-relaxations to a much broader class of problems than the case of completely independent or unitary designs. Meinshausen and Buhlmann [Ann. Statist. 34 (2006) 1436-1462] showed that, for neighborhood selection in Gaussian graphical models, under a neighborhood stability condition, the LASSO is consistent, even when the number of variables is of greater order than the sample size. Zhao and Yu [(2006) J. Machine Learning Research 7 2541-2567] formalized the neighborhood stability condition in the context of linear regression as a strong irrepresentable condition. That paper showed that under this condition, the LASSO selects exactly the set of nonzero regression coefficients, provided that these coefficients are bounded away from zero at a certain rate. In this paper, the regression coefficients outside an ideal model are assumed to be small, but not necessarily zero. Under a sparse Riesz condition on the correlation of design variables, we prove that the LASSO selects a model of the correct order of dimensionality, controls the bias of the selected model at a level determined by the contributions of small regression coefficients and threshold bias, and selects all coefficients of greater order than the bias of the selected model. Moreover, as a consequence of this rate consistency of the LASSO in model selection, it is proved that the sum of error squares for the mean response and the l α -loss for the regression coefficients converge at the best possible rates under the given conditions. An interesting aspect of our results is that the logarithm of the number of variables can be of the same order as the sample size for certain random dependent designs. This paper proves that an "old dog", namely -- the classical Johnson-Lindenstrauss transform, "performs new tricks" -- it gives a novel way of preserving differential privacy. We show that if we take two databases, @math and @math , such that (i) @math is a rank-1 matrix of bounded norm and (ii) all singular values of @math and @math are sufficiently large, then multiplying either @math or @math with a vector of iid normal Gaussians yields two statistically close distributions in the sense of differential privacy. Furthermore, a small, deterministic and alteration of the input is enough to assert that all singular values of @math are large. We apply the Johnson-Lindenstrauss transform to the task of approximating cut-queries: the number of edges crossing a @math -cut in a graph. We show that the JL transform allows us to that preserves edge differential privacy (where two graphs are neighbors if they differ on a single edge) while adding only @math random noise to any given query (w.h.p). Comparing the additive noise of our algorithm to existing algorithms for answering cut-queries in a differentially private manner, we outperform all others on small cuts ( @math ). We also apply our technique to the task of estimating the variance of a given matrix in any given direction. The JL transform allows us to that preserves differential privacy w.r.t bounded changes (each row in the matrix can change by at most a norm-1 vector) while adding random noise of magnitude independent of the size of the matrix (w.h.p). In contrast, existing algorithms introduce an error which depends on the matrix dimensions. In a recent article, El (Proc Natl Acad Sci 110(36):14557–14562, 2013) study the distribution of robust regression estimators in the regime in which the number of parameters p is of the same order as the number of samples n. Using numerical simulations and ‘highly plausible’ heuristic arguments, they unveil a striking new phenomenon. Namely, the regression coefficients contain an extra Gaussian noise component that is not explained by classical concepts such as the Fisher information matrix. We show here that that this phenomenon can be characterized rigorously using techniques that were developed by the authors for analyzing the Lasso estimator under high-dimensional asymptotics. We introduce an approximate message passing (AMP) algorithm to compute M-estimators and deploy state evolution to evaluate the operating characteristics of AMP and so also M-estimates. Our analysis clarifies that the ‘extra Gaussian noise’ encountered in this problem is fundamentally similar to phenomena already studied for regularized least squares in the setting (n<p ).