Many statistical models seek relationship between variables via subspaces of reduced dimensions. For instance, in factor models, variables are roughly distributed around a low dimensional subspace determined by the loading matrix; in mixed linear regression models, the coefficient vectors for different mixtures form a subspace that captures all regression functions; in multiple index models, the effect of covariates is summarized by the effective dimension reduction space.

Varying-coefficient partially linear models are frequently used in statistical modelling, but their estimation and inference have not been systematically studied. This paper proposes a profile least-squares technique for estimating the parametric component and studies the asymptotic normality of the profile least-squares estimator. The main focus is the examination of whether the generalized likelihood technique developed by Fan et al. is applicable to the testing problem for the parametric component of semiparametric models. We introduce the profile likelihood ratio test and demonstrate that it follows an asymptotically 2 distribution under the null hypothesis. This not only unveils a new Wilks type of phenomenon, but also provides a simple and useful method for semiparametric inferences. In addition, the Wald statistic for semiparametric models is introduced and demonstrated to possess a sampling property similar

For multiple index models, it has recently been shown that the sliced inverse regression (SIR) is consistent for estimating the sufficient dimension reduction (SDR) subspace if and only if the dimension p and sample size n satisfies that ρ=limp/n=0. Thus, when p is of the same or a higher order of n, additional assumptions such as sparsity have to be imposed in order to ensure consistency for SIR. By constructing artificial response variables made up from top eigenvectors of the estimated conditional covariance matrix, \widehat{var(𝔼[x|y])}, we introduce a simple Lasso regression method to obtain an estimate of the SDR subspace. The resulting algorithm, Lasso-SIR, is shown to be consistent and achieve the optimal convergence rate under certain sparsity conditions when p is of order o(n^2λ^2) where λ is the generalized signal noise ratio. We also demonstrate the superior performance of Lasso-SIR compared with existing approaches via extensive numerical studies and several real data examples.

In this paper, we study robust covariance estimation under the approximate factor model with observed factors. We propose a novel framework to first estimate the initial joint covariance matrix of the observed data and the factors, and then use it to recover the covariance matrix of the observed data. We prove that once the initial matrix estimator is good enough to maintain the element-wise optimal rate, the whole procedure will generate an estimated covariance with desired properties. For data with bounded fourth moments, we propose to use adaptive Huber loss minimization to give the initial joint covariance estimation. This approach is applicable to a much wider class of distributions, beyond sub-Gaussian and elliptical distributions. We also present an asymptotic result for adaptive Hubers M-estimator with a diverging parameter. The conclusions are demonstrated by extensive simulations and real data analysis.

In this paper we study the support recovery problem for single index models Y=f(X⊺β,ε), where f is an unknown link function, X∼Np(0,𝕀p) and β is an s-sparse unit vector such that βi∈{±1s√,0}. In particular, we look into the performance of two computationally inexpensive algorithms: (a) the diagonal thresholding sliced inverse regression (DT-SIR) introduced by Lin et al. (2015); and (b) a semi-definite programming (SDP) approach inspired by Amini & Wainwright (2008). When s=O(p1−δ) for some δ>0, we demonstrate that both procedures can succeed in recovering the support of β as long as the rescaled sample size κ=nslog(p−s) is larger than a certain critical threshold. On the other hand, when κ is smaller than a critical value, any algorithm fails to recover the support with probability at least 12 asymptotically. In other words, we demonstrate that both DT-SIR and the SDP approach are optimal (up to a scalar) for recovering the support of β in terms of sample size. We provide extensive simulations, as well as a real dataset application to help verify our theoretical observations.