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The EM algorithm is a widely used tool in maximum-likelihood estimation in incomplete data problems. Existing theoretical work has focused on conditions under which the iterates or likelihood values converge, and the associated rates of convergence. Such guarantees do not distinguish whether the ultimate fixed point is a near global optimum or a bad local optimum of the sample likelihood, nor do they relate the obtained fixed point to the global optima of the idealized population likelihood (obtained in the limit of infinite data). This paper develops a theoretical framework for quantifying when and how quickly EM-type iterates converge to a small neighborhood of a given global optimum of the population likelihood. For correctly specified models, such a characterization yields rigorous guarantees on the performance of certain two-stage estimators in which a suitable initial pilot estimator is refined with iterations of the EM algorithm. Our analysis is divided into two parts: a treatment of the EM and first-order EM algorithms at the population level, followed by results that apply to these algorithms on a finite set of samples. Our conditions allow for a characterization of the region of convergence of EM-type iterates to a given population fixed point, that is, the region of the parameter space over which convergence is guaranteed to a point within a small neighborhood of the specified population fixed point. We verify our conditions and give tight characterizations of the region of convergence for three canonical problems of interest: symmetric mixture of two Gaussians, symmetric mixture of two regressions and linear regression with covariates missing completely at random.

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.

Frequentists' inference often delivers point estimators associated with condence intervals or sets for parameters of interest. Constructing the condence intervals or sets requires understanding the sampling distributions of the point estimators, which, in many but not all cases, are related to asymptotic Normal distributions ensured by central limit theorems. Although previous literature has established various forms of central limit theorems for statistical inference in super population models, we still need general and convenient forms of central limit theorems for some randomization-based causal analysis of experimental data, where the parameters of interests are functions of a nite population and randomness comes solely from the treatment assignment. We use central limit theorems for sample surveys and rank statistics to establish general forms of the nite population central limit theorems that are particularly useful for proving asymptotic distributions of randomization tests under the sharp null hypothesis of zero individual causal eects, and for obtaining the asymptotic repeated sampling distributions of the causal eect estimators. The new central limit theorems hold for general experimental designs with multiple treatment levels, multiple treatment factors and vector outcomes, and are immediately applicable for studying the asymptotic properties of many methods in causal inference, including instrumental variable, regression adjustment, rerandomization, clustered randomized experiments, and so on. Previously, the asymptotic properties of these problems are often based on heuristic arguments, which in fact rely on general forms of nite population central limit theorems that have not been established before. Our new theorems ll in this gap by providing more solid theoretical foundation for asymptotic randomization-based causal inference.

Principal component analysis (PCA) is one of the most commonly used statistical procedures with a wide range of applications. This paper considers both minimax and adaptive estimation of the principal subspace in the high dimensional setting. Under mild technical conditions, we first establish optimal rates of convergence for estimating the principal subspace which sharp with respect to all the parameters, thus providing a complete character ization of the difficulty of the estimation problem in term of the convergence rate. The lower bound is obtained by calculating the local metric entropy an application of Fano's lemma. The rate optimal estimator is constructed using aggregation, which, however, might not be computationally feasible. We then introduce an adaptive procedure for estimating the principal sub space which is fully data driven and can be computed efficiently. It is shown that the estimator attains the optimal rates of convergence simultaneously over a large collection of the parameter spaces. A key idea in our construc tion is a reduction scheme which reduces the sparse PCA problem to a high dimensional multivariate regression problem. This method is potentially useful for other related