The multiple testing procedure plays an important role in detecting the presence of spatial signals for large scale imaging data. Typically, the spatial signals are sparse but clustered. This paper provides empirical evidence that for a range of commonly used control levels, the conventional FDR procedure can lack the ability to detect statistical significance, even if the -values under the true null hypotheses are independent and uniformly distributed; more generally, ignoring the neighboring information of spatially structured data will tend to diminish the detection effectiveness of the FDR procedure. This paper first introduces a scalar quantity to characterize the extent to which the lack of identification phenomenon(LIP) of the FDR procedure occurs. Second, we propose a new multiple comparison procedure, called FDR, to accommodate the spatial information of neighboring -values, via a local aggregation of -values. Theoretical properties of the FDR procedure are investigated under weak dependence of -values. It is shown that the FDR procedure alleviates the LIP of the FDR procedure, thus substantially facilitating the selection of more stringent control levels. Simulation evaluations indicate that the FDR procedure improves the detection sensitivity of the FDR procedure with little loss in detection specificity. The computational simplicity and detection effectiveness of the FDR procedure are illustrated through a real brain fMRI dataset.

No abstract uploaded!

This paper studies a weighted local linear regression smoother for longitudinal/clustered data, which takes a form similar to the classical weighted least squares estimate. As a hybrid of the methods of Chen and Jin (2005) and Wang (2003), the proposed local linear smoother maintains the advantages of both methods in computational and theoretical simplicity, variance minimization and bias reduction. Moreover, the proposed smoother is optimal in the sense that it attains linear minimax efficiency when the within-cluster correlation is correctly specified. In the special case that the joint density of covariates in a cluster exists and is continuous, any working within-cluster correlation would lead to linear minimax efficiency for the proposed method.

The main purpose of this workshop was to assemble international leaders from statistics and machine learning to identify important research problems, to cross-fertilize between the disciplines, and to ultimately start coordinated research efforts toward better solutions. The workshop focused on discussing modern methods for analysis complex high dimensional data with applications to econometrics, finance, biomedicine, genomics etc.

Measuring conditional dependence is an important topic in statistics with broad applications including graphical models. Under a factor model setting, a new conditional dependence measure based on projection is proposed. The corresponding conditional independence test is developed with the asymptotic null distribution unveiled where the number of factors could be high-dimensional. It is also shown that the new test has control over the asymptotic significance level and can be calculated efficiently. A generic method for building dependency graphs without Gaussian assumption using the new test is elaborated. Numerical results and real data analysis show the superiority of the new method.