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Main Authors: Weinstein, Asaf, Wallin, Jonas, Yekutieli, Daniel, Bogdan, Małgorzata
Format: Preprint
Published: 2019
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.08444
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author Weinstein, Asaf
Wallin, Jonas
Yekutieli, Daniel
Bogdan, Małgorzata
author_facet Weinstein, Asaf
Wallin, Jonas
Yekutieli, Daniel
Bogdan, Małgorzata
contents Regularization in fitting regression models has been a highly active topic of research in the past few decades, but most of the existing methods are designed for particular situations, e.g. for the case of a sparse coefficient vector. We consider the problem of designing $\textit{universally}$ optimal regularized estimators in a given generalized linear model with fixed effects. First, we propose as a contender the Bayes estimator against an $\textit{ideal}$ prior that assigns equal mass to every permutation of the fixed coefficient vector, thus depending on the true coefficients only through their empirical CDF. We prove some optimality properties of this oracle estimator in both the frequentist and Bayesian frameworks. To compete with the oracle estimator, we posit a hierarchical Bayes model where the individual coefficients are modeled as i.i.d. draws from a common distribution $π$, which is in turn assigned a Polya tree prior to reflect indefiniteness. We demonstrate in examples that the posterior mean of $π$ under the postulated model adapts nonparametrically to the empirical CDF of the true coefficients. Correspondingly, the posterior means of the coefficients themselves are used to mimic the ideal estimator. Numerical experiments show that our method has better estimation and prediction accuracy compared to various parametric and nonparametric alternatives, from relatively standard $L_p$-regularized estimators to modern penalized-likelihood and Bayesian estimators for high dimensional regression.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_1908_08444
institution arXiv
publishDate 2019
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Nonparametric Shrinkage Estimation in High Dimensional Generalized Linear Models via Polya Trees
Weinstein, Asaf
Wallin, Jonas
Yekutieli, Daniel
Bogdan, Małgorzata
Methodology
Regularization in fitting regression models has been a highly active topic of research in the past few decades, but most of the existing methods are designed for particular situations, e.g. for the case of a sparse coefficient vector. We consider the problem of designing $\textit{universally}$ optimal regularized estimators in a given generalized linear model with fixed effects. First, we propose as a contender the Bayes estimator against an $\textit{ideal}$ prior that assigns equal mass to every permutation of the fixed coefficient vector, thus depending on the true coefficients only through their empirical CDF. We prove some optimality properties of this oracle estimator in both the frequentist and Bayesian frameworks. To compete with the oracle estimator, we posit a hierarchical Bayes model where the individual coefficients are modeled as i.i.d. draws from a common distribution $π$, which is in turn assigned a Polya tree prior to reflect indefiniteness. We demonstrate in examples that the posterior mean of $π$ under the postulated model adapts nonparametrically to the empirical CDF of the true coefficients. Correspondingly, the posterior means of the coefficients themselves are used to mimic the ideal estimator. Numerical experiments show that our method has better estimation and prediction accuracy compared to various parametric and nonparametric alternatives, from relatively standard $L_p$-regularized estimators to modern penalized-likelihood and Bayesian estimators for high dimensional regression.
title Nonparametric Shrinkage Estimation in High Dimensional Generalized Linear Models via Polya Trees
topic Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.08444