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 uhlmann


2D Stability Selection: Design Jittering for Doubly Stable Feature Selection

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We study feature selection in high-dimensional regression under two distinct sources of instability: sampling variability and measurement error in the design matrix. Stability Selection addresses the former through sub-sampling and aggregation, but does not explicitly stress-test robustness to noisy predictors. We introduce doubly stable feature selection, a perturb-and-aggregate framework that targets features whose inclusion is stable both across randomization and across increasing levels of design noise. The method injects controlled additive noise into the design matrix, fits a fixed base selector such as the Lasso on the perturbed data, and aggregates selection frequencies. Sweeping over a grid of noise levels yields a stability path that summarizes robustness to measurement error while using the full sample size and isolating the effect of design perturbations. On the theory side, we show that classical model-selection conditions are preserved under sufficiently small perturbations, with a high-probability extension for Gaussian noise. Empirically, experiments on synthetic and real datasets show improved robustness compared with Stability Selection and standard base selectors.


Inference for High-dimensional Maximin Effects in Heterogeneous Regression Models Using a Sampling Approach

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Heterogeneity is an important feature of modern data sets and a central task is to extract information from large-scale and heterogeneous data. In this paper, we consider multiple high-dimensional linear models and adopt the definition of maximin effect (Meinshausen, B{\"u}hlmann, AoS, 43(4), 1801--1830) to summarize the information contained in this heterogeneous model. We define the maximin effect for a targeted population whose covariate distribution is possibly different from that of the observed data. We further introduce a ridge-type maximin effect to simultaneously account for reward optimality and statistical stability. To identify the high-dimensional maximin effect, we estimate the regression covariance matrix by a debiased estimator and use it to construct the aggregation weights for the maximin effect. A main challenge for statistical inference is that the estimated weights might have a mixture distribution and the resulted maximin effect estimator is not necessarily asymptotic normal. To address this, we devise a novel sampling approach to construct the confidence interval for any linear contrast of high-dimensional maximin effects. The coverage and precision properties of the proposed confidence interval are studied. The proposed method is demonstrated over simulations and a genetic data set on yeast colony growth under different environments.


Statistical significance in high-dimensional linear mixed models

arXiv.org Machine Learning

This paper concerns the development of an inferential framework for high-dimensional linear mixed effect models. These are suitable models, for instance, when we have $n$ repeated measurements for $M$ subjects. We consider a scenario where the number of fixed effects $p$ is large (and may be larger than $M$), but the number of random effects $q$ is small. Our framework is inspired by a recent line of work that proposes de-biasing penalized estimators to perform inference for high-dimensional linear models with fixed effects only. In particular, we demonstrate how to correct a `naive' ridge estimator in extension of work by B\"uhlmann (2013) to build asymptotically valid confidence intervals for mixed effect models. We validate our theoretical results with numerical experiments, in which we show our method outperforms those that fail to account for correlation induced by the random effects. For a practical demonstration we consider a riboflavin production dataset that exhibits group structure, and show that conclusions drawn using our method are consistent with those obtained on a similar dataset without group structure.