Estimation of high dimensional mean regression in the absence of symmetry and light tail assumptions

Jianqing Fan, Quefeng Li, Yuyan Wang

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

130 Scopus citations

Abstract

Data subject to heavy-tailed errors are commonly encountered in various scientific fields. To address this problem, procedures based on quantile regression and least absolute deviation regression have been developed in recent years. These methods essentially estimate the conditional median (or quantile) function. They can be very different from the conditional mean functions, especially when distributions are asymmetric and heteroscedastic. How can we efficiently estimate the mean regression functions in ultrahigh dimensional settings with existence of only the second moment? To solve this problem, we propose a penalized Huber loss with diverging parameter to reduce biases created by the traditional Huber loss. Such a penalized robust approximate (RA) quadratic loss will be called the RA lasso. In the ultrahigh dimensional setting, where the dimensionality can grow exponentially with the sample size, our results reveal that the RA lasso estimator produces a consistent estimator at the same rate as the optimal rate under the light tail situation. We further study the computational convergence of the RA lasso and show that the composite gradient descent algorithm indeed produces a solution that admits the same optimal rate after sufficient iterations. As a by-product, we also establish the concentration inequality for estimating the population mean when there is only the second moment. We compare the RA lasso with other regularized robust estimators based on quantile regression and least absolute deviation regression. Extensive simulation studies demonstrate the satisfactory finite sample performance of the RA lasso.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)247-265
Number of pages19
JournalJournal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series B: Statistical Methodology
Volume79
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 1 2017

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Statistics and Probability
  • Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty

Keywords

  • High dimension
  • Huber loss
  • M-estimator
  • Optimal rate
  • Robust regularization

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