Motivated by normalizing DNA microarray data and by predicting the interest rates, we explore nonparametric estimation of additive models with highly correlated covariates. We introduce two novel approaches for estimating the additive components, integration estimation and pooled backfitting estimation. The former is designed for highly correlated covariates, and the latter is useful for nonhighly correlated covariates. Asymptotic normalities of the proposed estimators are established. Simulations are conducted to demonstrate finite sample behaviors of the proposed estimators, and real data examples are given to illustrate the value of the methodology.

This paper introduces an efficient approach to integrating non-local statistics into the higher-order Markov Random Fields (MRFs) framework. Motivated by the observation that many non-local statistics (eg, shape priors, color distributions) can usually be represented by a small number of parameters, we reformulate the higher-order MRF model by introducing additional latent variables to represent the intrinsic dimensions of the higher-order cliques. The resulting new model, called NC-MRF, not only provides the flexibility in representing the configurations of higher-order cliques, but also automatically decomposes the energy function into less coupled terms, allowing us to design an efficient algorithmic framework for maximum a posteriori (MAP) inference. Based on this novel modeling/inference framework, we achieve state-of-the-art solutions to the challenging problems of class-specific image segmentation and template-based 3D facial expression tracking, which demonstrate the potential of our approach.

Many data mining and statistical machine learning algorithms have been developed to select a subset of covariates to associate with a response variable. Spurious discoveries can easily arise in high-dimensional data analysis due to enormous possibilities of such selections. How can we know statistically our discoveries better than those by chance? In this paper, we define a measure of goodness of spurious fit, which shows how good a response variable can be fitted by an optimally selected subset of covariates under the null model, and propose a simple and effective LAMM algorithm to compute it. It coincides with the maximum spurious correlation for linear models and can be regarded as a generalized maximum spurious correlation. We derive the asymptotic distribution of such goodness of spurious fit for generalized linear models and L1 regression. Such an asymptotic distribution depends on the sample size, ambient dimension, the number of variables used in the fit, and the covariance information. It can be consistently estimated by multiplier bootstrapping and used as a benchmark to guard against spurious discoveries. It can also be applied to model selection, which considers only candidate models with goodness of fits better than those by spurious fits. The theory and method are convincingly illustrated by simulated examples and an application to the binary outcomes from German Neuroblastoma Trials.

We study a system of semilinear hyperbolic equations passively advected by smooth white noise in time random velocity fields. Such a system arises in modelling non-premixed isothermal turbulent flames under single-step kinetics of fuel and oxidizer. We derive closed equations for one-point and multi-point probability distribution functions (PDFs) and closed-form analytical formulae for the one-point PDF function, as well as the two-point PDF function under homogeneity and isotropy. Exact solution formulae allow us to analyse the ensemble-averaged fuel/oxidizer concentrations and the motion of their level curves. We recover the empirical formulae of combustion in the thin reaction zone limit and show that these approximate formulae can either underestimate or overestimate average concentrations when the reaction zone is not tending to zero. We show that the averaged reaction rate slows down locally in

This paper studies the sparsistency and rates of convergence for estimating sparse covariance and precision matrices based on penalized likelihood with nonconvex penalty functions. Here, sparsistency refers to the property that all parameters that are zero are actually estimated as zero with probability tending to one. Depending on the case of applications, sparsity priori may occur on the covariance matrix, its inverse or its Cholesky decomposition. We study these three sparsity exploration problems under a unified framework with a general penalty function. We show that the rates of convergence for these problems under the Frobenius norm are of order (s n log p n/n) 1/2, where s n is the number of nonzero elements, p n is the size of the covariance matrix and n is the sample size. This explicitly spells out the contribution of high-dimensionality is merely of a logarithmic factor. The conditions on the rate with which