The leverage effect refers to the generally negative correlation between an asset return and its changes of volatility. A natural estimate consists in using the empirical correlation between the daily returns and the changes of daily volatility estimated from high frequency data. The puzzle lies in the fact that such an intuitively natural estimate yields nearly zero correlation for most assets tested, despite the many economic reasons for expecting the estimated correlation to be negative. To better understand the sources of the puzzle, we analyze the different asymptotic biases that are involved in high frequency estimation of the leverage effect, including biases due to discretization errors, to smoothing errors in estimating spot volatilities, to estimation error, and to market microstructure noise. This decomposition enables us to propose novel bias correction methods for estimating the leverage effect.

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Multiple hypothesis testing is a fundamental problem in high-dimensional inference, with wide applications in many scientific fields. In genome-wide association studies, tens of thousands of tests are performed simultaneously to find if any single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are associated with some traits and those tests are correlated. When test statistics are correlated, false discovery control becomes very challenging under arbitrary dependence. In this article, we propose a novel method—based on principal factor approximation—that successfully subtracts the common dependence and weakens significantly the correlation structure, to deal with an arbitrary dependence structure.We derive an approximate expression for false discovery proportion (FDP) in large-scale multiple testing when a common threshold is used and provide a consistent estimate of realized FDP. This result has important applications in controlling false discovery rate and FDP. Our estimate of realized FDP compares favorably with Efron’s approach, as demonstrated in the simulated examples. Our approach is further illustrated by some real data applications. We also propose a dependence-adjusted procedure that is more powerful than the fixed-threshold procedure. Supplementary material for this article is available online.

This article deals with statistical inferences based on the varying-coefficient models proposed by Hastie and Tibshirani. Local polynomial regression techniques are used to estimate coefficient functions, and the asymptotic normality of the resulting estimators is established. The standard error formulas for estimated coefficients are derived and are empirically tested. A goodness-of-fit test technique, based on a nonparametric maximum likelihood ratio type of test, is also proposed to detect whether certain coefficient functions in a varying-coefficient model are constant or whether any covariates are statistically significant in the model. The null distribution of the test is estimated by a conditional bootstrap method. Our estimation techniques involve solving hundreds of local likelihood equations. To reduce the computational burden, a one-step Newton-Raphson estimator is proposed and implemented. The resulting one

This paper discusses statistical methods for estimating complex correlation structure from large pharmacogenomic datasets. We selectively review several prominent statistical methods for estimating large covariance matrix for understanding correlation structure, inverse covariance matrix for network modeling, large-scale simultaneous tests for selecting significantly differently expressed genes and proteins and genetic markers for complex diseases, and high dimensional variable selection for identifying important molecules for understanding molecule mechanisms in pharmacogenomics. Their applications to gene network estimation and biomarker selection are used to illustrate the methodological power. Several new challenges of Big data analysis, including complex data distribution, missing data, measurement error, spurious correlation, endogeneity, and the need for robust statistical methods, are also discussed.