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Sure screening technique has been considered as a powerful tool to handle the ultrahigh dimensional variable selection problems, where the dimensionality p and the sample size n can satisfy the NP dimensionality logp =O(na) for some a>0[J. R. Stat. Soc. Ser. B. Stat. Methodol. 70 (2008) 849–911]. The current paper aims to simultaneously tackle the “universality” and “effectiveness” of sure screening procedures. For the “universality,” we develop a general and unified framework for nonparametric screening methods from a loss function perspective. Consider a loss function to measure the divergence of the response variable and the underlying nonparametric function of covariates. We newly propose a class of loss functions called conditional strictly convex loss, which contains, but is not limited to, negative log likelihood loss from one-parameter exponential families, exponential loss for binary classification and quantile regression loss. The sure screening property and model selection size control will be established within this class of loss functions. For the “effectiveness,” we focus on a goodness-of-fit nonparametric screening (Goffins) method under conditional strictly convex loss. Interestingly, we can achieve a better convergence probability of containing the true model compared with related literature. The superior performance of our proposed method has been further demonstrated by extensive simulation studies and some real scientific data example.

Large-scale multiple testing with correlated and heavy-tailed data arises in a wide range of research areas from genomics, medical imaging to finance. Conventional methods for estimating the false discovery proportion (FDP) often ignore the effect of heavy-tailedness and the dependence structure among test statistics, and thus may lead to inefficient or even inconsistent estimation. Also, the assumption of joint normality is often imposed, which is too stringent for many applications. To address these challenges, in this paper we propose a factoradjusted robust procedure for large-scale simultaneous inference with control of the false discovery proportion. We demonstrate that robust factor adjustments are extremely important in both improving the power of the tests and controlling FDP. We identify general conditions under which the proposed method produces consistent estimate of the FDP. As a byproduct that is of independent interest, we establish an exponential-type deviation inequality for a robust U-type covariance estimator under the spectral norm. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate the advantage of the proposed method over several state-of-the-art methods especially when the data are generated from heavy-tailed distributions. Our proposed procedures are implemented in the R-package FarmTest. Supported by NSF Grants DMS-1662139, DMS-1712591, and NIH Grant R01-GM072611-12.

A class of variable selection procedures for parametric models via nonconcave penalized likelihood was proposed in Fan and Li (2001a). It has been shown there that the resulting procedures perform as well as if the subset of significant variables were known in advance. Such a property is called an oracle property. The proposed procedures were illustrated in the context of linear regression, robust linear regression and generalized linear models. In this paper, the nonconcave penalized likelihood approach is extended further to the Cox proportional hazards model and the Cox proportional hazards frailty model, two commonly used semi-parametric models in survival analysis. As a result, new variable selection procedures for these two commonly-used models are proposed. It is demonstrated how the rates of convergence depend on the regularization parameter in the penalty function. Further, with a proper choice of

The problem of estimating the density function and the regression function involving errors-in-variables in time series is considered. Under appropriate conditions, it is shown that the rates obtained in Fan (1991), Fan and Truong (1990) are also achievable in the context of dependent observations. Consequently, the results presented here extend our previous results for cross-sectional data to the longitudinal ones. oAbbreviated title. Measurement Errors in Time Series AMS 1980 subject classification. Primary 62G20. Secondary 62G05, 62J99.