We consider the fundamental problem of solving quadratic systems of m equations in n variables. We propose a novel method, which starting with an initial guess computed by means of a spectral method, proceeds by minimizing a nonconvex functional as in the Wirtinger flow approach. There are several key distinguishing features, most notably, a distinct objective functional and novel update rules, which operate in an adaptive fashion and drop terms bearing too much influence on the search direction. These careful selection rules provide a tighter initial guess, better descent directions, and thus enhanced practical performance. On the theoretical side, we prove that for certain unstructured models of quadratic systems, our algorithms return the correct solution in linear time, i.e. in time proportional to reading the data and as soon as the ratio m/n between the number of equations and unknowns exceeds a fixed numerical constant. We extend the theory to deal with noisy systems and prove that our algorithms achieve a statistical accuracy, which is nearly un-improvable. We complement our theoretical study with numerical examples showing that solving random quadratic systems is both computationally and statistically not much harder than solving linear systems of the same size---hence the title of this paper. For instance, we demonstrate empirically that the computational cost of our algorithm is about four times that of solving a least-squares problem of the same size.

Economists historically measure the degree to which the market is surprised by an earnings announcement by the consensus forecast error, defined as difference between the actual earnings and the consensus forecast. The consensus might be calculated using either the mean or median of security analysts forecasts. The premise of this measure is that the consensus forecast is a good proxy for the markets expectation of earnings. Hence the consensus forecast error captures how surprised the market is when the earnings is announced. The consensus forecast error is a building block of a host of studies across finance, accounting and economics (see for a survey of event studies in Kothari (2001)). For instance, in finance and accounting, it is used in event studies of how efficiently markets react to earnings announcements. Efficient market studies when it comes to bond or currency markets and macroeconomic

We establish necessary and sufficient conditions for consistent root reconstruction in continuous-time Markov models with countable state space on bounded-height trees. Here a root state estimator is said to be consistent if the probability that it returns to the true root state converges to 1 as the number of leaves tends to infinity. We also derive quantitative bounds on the error of reconstruction. Our results answer a question of Gascuel and Steel [GS10] and have implications for ancestral sequence reconstruction in a classical evolutionary model of nucleotide insertion and deletion [TKF91].

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Penalized likelihood methods are fundamental to ultrahigh dimensional variable selection. How high dimensionality such methods can handle remains largely unknown. In this paper, we show that in the context of generalized linear models, such methods possess model selection consistency with oracle properties even for dimensionality of nonpolynomial (NP) order of sample size, for a class of penalized likelihood approaches using folded-concave penalty functions, which were introduced to ameliorate the bias problems of convex penalty functions. This fills a long-standing gap in the literature where the dimensionality is allowed to grow slowly with the sample size. Our results are also applicable to penalized likelihood with the <i>L</i> ₁ -penalty, which is a convex function at the boundary of the class of folded-concave penalty functions under consideration. The coordinate optimization is implemented for finding the