A Nonparametric Maximum Likelihood Approach to Mixture of Regression

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jiang, Hansheng, Guntuboyina, Adityanand
Format: Preprint
Published: 2021
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915362521481216
author Jiang, Hansheng
Guntuboyina, Adityanand
author_facet Jiang, Hansheng
Guntuboyina, Adityanand
contents We study mixture of linear regression (random coefficient) models, which capture population heterogeneity by allowing the regression coefficients to follow an unknown distribution $G^*$. In contrast to common parametric methods that fix the mixing distribution form and rely on the EM algorithm, we develop a fully nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator (NPMLE). We show that this estimator exists under broad conditions and can be computed via a discrete approximation procedure inspired by the exemplar method. We further establish theoretical guarantees demonstrating that the NPMLE achieves near-parametric rates in estimating the conditional density of $Y|X$, both for fixed and random designs, when $σ$ is known and $G^*$ has compact support. In the random design setting, we also prove consistency of the estimated mixing distribution in the Lévy-Prokhorov distance. Numerical experiments indicate that our approach performs well and additionally enables posterior-based individualized coefficient inference through an empirical Bayes framework.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2108_09816
institution arXiv
publishDate 2021
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Nonparametric Maximum Likelihood Approach to Mixture of Regression
Jiang, Hansheng
Guntuboyina, Adityanand
Methodology
Statistics Theory
We study mixture of linear regression (random coefficient) models, which capture population heterogeneity by allowing the regression coefficients to follow an unknown distribution $G^*$. In contrast to common parametric methods that fix the mixing distribution form and rely on the EM algorithm, we develop a fully nonparametric maximum likelihood estimator (NPMLE). We show that this estimator exists under broad conditions and can be computed via a discrete approximation procedure inspired by the exemplar method. We further establish theoretical guarantees demonstrating that the NPMLE achieves near-parametric rates in estimating the conditional density of $Y|X$, both for fixed and random designs, when $σ$ is known and $G^*$ has compact support. In the random design setting, we also prove consistency of the estimated mixing distribution in the Lévy-Prokhorov distance. Numerical experiments indicate that our approach performs well and additionally enables posterior-based individualized coefficient inference through an empirical Bayes framework.
title A Nonparametric Maximum Likelihood Approach to Mixture of Regression
topic Methodology
Statistics Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.09816