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Main Authors: Bates, Stephen, Candès, Emmanuel, Janson, Lucas, Wang, Wenshuo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2019
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.00434
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author Bates, Stephen
Candès, Emmanuel
Janson, Lucas
Wang, Wenshuo
author_facet Bates, Stephen
Candès, Emmanuel
Janson, Lucas
Wang, Wenshuo
contents Model-X knockoffs is a wrapper that transforms essentially any feature importance measure into a variable selection algorithm, which discovers true effects while rigorously controlling the expected fraction of false positives. A frequently discussed challenge to apply this method is to construct knockoff variables, which are synthetic variables obeying a crucial exchangeability property with the explanatory variables under study. This paper introduces techniques for knockoff generation in great generality: we provide a sequential characterization of all possible knockoff distributions, which leads to a Metropolis-Hastingsformulation of an exact knockoff sampler. We further show how to use conditional independence structure to speed up computations. Combining these two threads, we introduce an explicit set of sequential algorithms and empirically demonstrate their effectiveness. Our theoretical analysis proves that our algorithms achieve near-optimal computational complexity in certain cases. The techniques we develop are sufficiently rich to enable knockoff sampling in challenging models including cases where the covariates are continuous and heavy-tailed, and follow a graphical model such as the Ising model.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_1903_00434
institution arXiv
publishDate 2019
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Metropolized Knockoff Sampling
Bates, Stephen
Candès, Emmanuel
Janson, Lucas
Wang, Wenshuo
Methodology
Model-X knockoffs is a wrapper that transforms essentially any feature importance measure into a variable selection algorithm, which discovers true effects while rigorously controlling the expected fraction of false positives. A frequently discussed challenge to apply this method is to construct knockoff variables, which are synthetic variables obeying a crucial exchangeability property with the explanatory variables under study. This paper introduces techniques for knockoff generation in great generality: we provide a sequential characterization of all possible knockoff distributions, which leads to a Metropolis-Hastingsformulation of an exact knockoff sampler. We further show how to use conditional independence structure to speed up computations. Combining these two threads, we introduce an explicit set of sequential algorithms and empirically demonstrate their effectiveness. Our theoretical analysis proves that our algorithms achieve near-optimal computational complexity in certain cases. The techniques we develop are sufficiently rich to enable knockoff sampling in challenging models including cases where the covariates are continuous and heavy-tailed, and follow a graphical model such as the Ising model.
title Metropolized Knockoff Sampling
topic Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.00434