Selective and marginal selective inference for exceptional groups

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Hoff, Peter, Tokdar, Surya
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Hoff, Peter
Tokdar, Surya
author_facet Hoff, Peter
Tokdar, Surya
contents Statistical analyses of multipopulation studies often use the data to select a particular population as the target of inference. For example, a confidence interval may be constructed for a population only in the event that its sample mean is larger than that of the other populations. We show that for the normal means model, confidence interval procedures that maintain strict coverage control conditional on such a selection event will have infinite expected width. For applications where such selective coverage control is of interest, this result motivates the development of procedures with finite expected width and approximate selective coverage control over a range of plausible parameter values. To this end, we develop selection-adjusted empirical Bayes confidence procedures that use information from the data to approximate an oracle confidence procedure that has exact selective coverage control and finite expected width. In numerical comparisons of the oracle and empirical Bayes procedures to procedures that only guarantee selective coverage control marginally over selection events, we find that improved selective coverage control comes at the cost of increased expected interval width.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_13538
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Selective and marginal selective inference for exceptional groups
Hoff, Peter
Tokdar, Surya
Statistics Theory
Methodology
62F25, 62F07
Statistical analyses of multipopulation studies often use the data to select a particular population as the target of inference. For example, a confidence interval may be constructed for a population only in the event that its sample mean is larger than that of the other populations. We show that for the normal means model, confidence interval procedures that maintain strict coverage control conditional on such a selection event will have infinite expected width. For applications where such selective coverage control is of interest, this result motivates the development of procedures with finite expected width and approximate selective coverage control over a range of plausible parameter values. To this end, we develop selection-adjusted empirical Bayes confidence procedures that use information from the data to approximate an oracle confidence procedure that has exact selective coverage control and finite expected width. In numerical comparisons of the oracle and empirical Bayes procedures to procedures that only guarantee selective coverage control marginally over selection events, we find that improved selective coverage control comes at the cost of increased expected interval width.
title Selective and marginal selective inference for exceptional groups
topic Statistics Theory
Methodology
62F25, 62F07
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13538