Blocking is commonly used in randomized experiments to increase efficiency of estimation. A generalization of blocking removes allocations with imbalance in covariate distributions between treated and control units, and then randomizes within the remaining set of allocations with balance. This idea of rerandomization was formalized by Morgan and Rubin (Annals of Statistics, 2012, 40, 1263–1282), who suggested using Mahalanobis distance between treated and control covariate means as the criterion for removing unbalanced allocations. Kallus (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B: Statistical Methodology, 2018, 80, 85–112) proposed reducing the set of balanced allocations to the minimum. Here we discuss the implication of such an ‘optimal’ rerandomization design for inferences to the units in the sample and to the population from which the units in the sample were randomly drawn. We argue that, in general, it is a bad idea to seek the optimal design for an inference because that inference typically only reflects uncertainty from the random sampling of units, which is usually hypothetical, and not the randomization of units to treatment versus control.

Comparing DNA or protein sequences plays an important role in the functional analysis of genomes. Despite many methods available for sequences comparison, few methods retain the information content of sequences. We propose a new approach, the Yau-Hausdorff method, which considers all translations and rotations when seeking the best match of graphical curves of DNA or protein sequences. The complexity of this method is lower than that of any other two dimensional minimum Hausdorff algorithm. The Yau-Hausdorff method can be used for measuring the similarity of DNA sequences based on two important tools: the Yau-Hausdorff distance and graphical representation of DNA sequences. The graphical representations of DNA sequences conserve all sequence information and the Yau-Hausdorff distance is mathematically proved as a true metric. Therefore, the proposed distance can preciously measure the similarity of DNA sequences. The phylogenetic analyses of DNA sequences by the Yau-Hausdorff distance show the accuracy and stability of our approach in similarity comparison of DNA or protein sequences. This study demonstrates that Yau-Hausdorff distance is a natural metric for DNA and protein sequences with high level of stability. The approach can be also applied to similarity analysis of protein sequences by graphic representations, as well as general two dimensional shape matching.

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In this paper we study the support recovery problem for single index models Y=f(X⊺β,ε), where f is an unknown link function, X∼Np(0,𝕀p) and β is an s-sparse unit vector such that βi∈{±1s√,0}. In particular, we look into the performance of two computationally inexpensive algorithms: (a) the diagonal thresholding sliced inverse regression (DT-SIR) introduced by Lin et al. (2015); and (b) a semi-definite programming (SDP) approach inspired by Amini & Wainwright (2008). When s=O(p1−δ) for some δ>0, we demonstrate that both procedures can succeed in recovering the support of β as long as the rescaled sample size κ=nslog(p−s) is larger than a certain critical threshold. On the other hand, when κ is smaller than a critical value, any algorithm fails to recover the support with probability at least 12 asymptotically. In other words, we demonstrate that both DT-SIR and the SDP approach are optimal (up to a scalar) for recovering the support of β in terms of sample size. We provide extensive simulations, as well as a real dataset application to help verify our theoretical observations.

In this paper, we prove a CLT for the sample canonical correlation coefficients between two high-dimensional random vectors with finite rank correlations. More precisely, consider two random vectors $\wt{\bx}=\mathbf x + A \mathbf z $ and $\wt{\by}=\mathbf y + B \mathbf z $, where $\mathbf x \in \R^p$, $\mathbf y \in \R^q$ and $\mathbf z\in \R^r$ are independent random vectors with i.i.d.\;entries of mean zero and variance one, and $A \in \R^{p\times r}$ and $B\in \R^{q\times r}$ are two arbitrary deterministic matrices. Given $n$ samples of $\wt{\bx}$ and $\wt{\by}$, we stack them into two matrices $\cal X= X+AZ$ and $\cal Y= Y+BZ$, where $X\in \R^{p\times n}$, $Y\in \R^{q\times n}$ and $Z\in \R^{r\times n}$ are random matrices with i.i.d.\;entries of mean zero and variance one. Let $\wt\lambda_1 \ge \wt\lambda_2\ge \cdots \ge \wt\lambda_{r}$ be the largest $r$ eigenvalues of the sample canonical correlation (SCC) matrix $\cal C_{\cal X\cal Y}=(\cal X\cal X^\top)^{-1/2}\cal X\cal Y^\top (\cal Y\cal Y^\top)^{-1}\cal Y \cal X^\top (\cal X\cal X^\top)^{-1/2}$, and let $t_1\ge t_2 \ge \cdots\ge t_r$ be the squares of the population canonical correlation coefficients between $\wt{\bx}$ and $\wt{\by}$. Under certain moment assumptions, we show that there exists a threshold $t_c \in(0, 1)$ such that if $t_i>t_c$, then \smash{$\sqrt{n} (\wt\lambda_i-\theta_i)$} converges weakly to a centered normal distribution, where $\theta_i $ is a fixed outlier location determined by $t_i$. Our proof uses a self-adjoint linearization of the SCC matrix and a sharp local law on the inverse of the linearized matrix.