We consider diffusivity of random walks with transition probabilities depending on the number of consecutive traversals of the last traversed edge, the so called senile reinforced random walk (SeRW). In one dimension, the walk is known to be sub-diffusive with identity reinforcement function. We perturb the model by introducing a small probability \delta of escaping the last traversed edge at each step. The perturbed SeRW model is diffusive for any \delta , with enhanced diffusivity (\delta ) in the small \delta regime. We further study stochastically perturbed SeRW models by having the last edge escape probability of the form \delta with \delta 's being independent random variables. Enhanced diffusivity in such models are logarithmically close to the so called residual diffusivity (positive in the zero \delta limit), with diffusivity between \delta and \delta . Finally, we generalize our results to higher dimensions where the unperturbed model is already diffusive. The enhanced diffusivity can be as much as \delta .

Folded concave penalization methods have been shown to enjoy the strong oracle property for high-dimensional sparse estimation. However, a folded concave penalization problem usually has multiple local solutions and the oracle property is established only for one of the unknown local solutions. A challenging fundamental issue still remains that it is not clear whether the local optimum computed by a given optimization algorithm possesses those nice theoretical properties. To close this important theoretical gap in over a decade, we provide a unified theory to show explicitly how to obtain the oracle solution via the local linear approximation algorithm. For a folded concave penalized estimation problem, we show that as long as the problem is localizable and the oracle estimator is well behaved, we can obtain the oracle estimator by using the one-step local linear approximation. In addition, once the oracle estimator is obtained, the local linear approximation algorithm converges, namely, it produces the same estimator in the next iteration. The general theory is demonstrated by using four classical sparse estimation problems, that is, sparse linear regression, sparse logistic regression, sparse precision matrix estimation, and sparse quantile regression.

Using high-frequency data, we estimate the risk of a large portfolio with weights being the solution of an optimization problem subject to some linear inequality constraints. We propose a fully nonparametric approach as a benchmark, as well as a factor-based semiparametric approach with observable factors to attack the curse of dimensionality. We provide in-fill asymptotic distributions of the realized volatility estimators of the optimal portfolio, while taking into account the estimation error in the optimal portfolio weights as a result of the covariance matrix estimation. Our theoretical findings suggest that ignoring such an error leads to a first-order asymptotic bias which undermines the statistical inference. Such a bias is related to in-sample optimism in portfolio allocation. Our simulation results suggest satisfactory finite sample performance after bias correction, and that the factor-based approach becomes increasingly superior with a growing cross-sectional dimension. Empirically, using a large cross-section of high-frequency stock returns, we find our estimator successfully addresses the issue of in-sample optimism.

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.

Motivated by the problem of colocalization analysis in fluorescence microscopic imaging, we study in this paper structured detection of correlated regions between two random processes observed on a common domain. We argue that although intuitive, direct use of the maximum log-likelihood statistic suffers from potential bias and substantially reduced power, and introduce a simple size-based normalization to overcome this problem. We show that scanning with the proposed size-corrected likelihood ratio statistics leads to optimal correlation detection over a large collection of structured correlation detection problems.