A method for exploring the structure of populations of complex objects, such as images, is considered. The objects are summarized by feature vectors. The statistical backbone is Principal Component Analysis in the space of feature vectors. Visual insights come from representing the results in the original data space. In an ophthalmological example, endemic outliers motivate the development of a bounded influence approach to PCA.

In this paper, we analyze the minimization of seminorms ∥L · ∥ on R^n under the constraint of a bounded I-divergence D(b,H·) for rather general linear operators H and L. The I-divergence is also known as Kullback–Leibler divergence and appears in many models in imaging science, in particular when dealing with Poisson data but also in the case of multiplicative Gamma noise. Often H represents, e.g., a linear blur operator and L is some discrete derivative or frame analysis operator. A central part of this paper consists in proving relations between the parameters of I-divergence constrained and penalized problems. To solve the I-divergence constrained problem, we consider various first-order primal–dual algorithms which reduce the problem to the solution of certain proximal minimization problems in each iteration step. One of these proximation problems is an I-divergence constrained least-squares problem which can be solved based on Morozov’s discrepancy principle by a Newton method. We prove that these algorithms produce not only a sequence of vectors which converges to a minimizer of the constrained problem but also a sequence of parameters which converges to a regularization parameter so that the corresponding penalized problem has the same solution. Furthermore, we derive a rule for automatically setting the constraint parameter for data corrupted by multiplicative Gamma noise. The performance of the various algorithms is finally demonstrated for different image restoration tasks both for images corrupted by Poisson noise and multiplicative Gamma noise.

High dimensionality comparable to sample size is common in many statistical problems. We examine covariance matrix estimation in the asymptotic framework that the dimensionality p tends to as the sample size n increases. Motivated by the Arbitrage Pricing Theory in finance, a multi-factor model is employed to reduce dimensionality and to estimate the covariance matrix. The factors are observable and the number of factors K is allowed to grow with p. We investigate the impact of p and K on the performance of the model-based covariance matrix estimator. Under mild assumptions, we have established convergence rates and asymptotic normality of the model-based estimator. Its performance is compared with that of the sample covariance matrix. We identify situations under which the factor approach increases performance substantially or marginally. The impacts of covariance matrix estimation on optimal

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A bandwidth selection method is proposed for local linear regression. Our approach is to combine the ideas of optimal bandwidth selection of Hall et al.(1991) in kernel density estimation, and use of direct bias and variance in Fan and Gijbels (1995) for local linear regression. We show that the bandwidth selector has an optimal relative rate of convergence of n-1/2 with n the sample size.