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Important advances have recently been achieved in developing procedures yielding uniformly valid inference for a low dimensional causal parameter when high-dimensional nuisance models must be estimated. In this paper, we review the literature on uniformly valid causal inference and discuss the costs and benefits of using uniformly valid inference procedures. Naive estimation strategies based on regularisation, machine learning, or a preliminary model selection stage for the nuisance models have finite sample distributions which are badly approximated by their asymptotic distributions. To solve this serious problem, estimators which converge uniformly in distribution over a class of data generating mechanisms have been proposed in the literature. In order to obtain uniformly valid results in high-dimensional situations, sparsity conditions for the nuisance models need typically to be made, although a double robustness property holds, whereby if one of the nuisance model is more sparse, the other nuisance model is allowed to be less sparse. While uniformly valid inference is a highly desirable property, uniformly valid procedures pay a high price in terms of inflated variability. Our discussion of this dilemma is illustrated by the study of a double-selection outcome regression estimator, which we show is uniformly asymptotically unbiased, but is less variable than uniformly valid estimators in the numerical experiments conducted. Originally included in thesis in manuscript form.

The connections between information pooling and adaptability as well as superefficiency are considered. Separable rules, which figure prominently in wavelet and other orthogonal series methods, are shown to lack adaptability; they are necessarily not rate-adaptive. A sharp lower bound on the cost of adaptation for separable rules is obtained. We show that adaptability is achieved through information pooling. A tight lower bound on the amount of information pooling required for achieving rate-optimal adaptation is given. Furthermore, in a sharp contrast to the separable rules, it is shown that adaptive non-separable estimators can be superefficient at every point in the parameter spaces. The results demonstrate that information pooling is the key to increasing estimation precision as well as achieving adaptability and even superefficiency.

Copyright © 2013 Springer Netherlands. Superefficiency is an important extension of DEA that overcomes some limitations of the traditional models, specifically allowing ranking of efficient units and a unique set of weights for those units. Weights restriction is a well-known technique in the DEA field. When those techniques are applied, weights cluster around its new limits, making its evaluation dependent of its levels. This chapter introduces a new approach to weights adjustment by goal programming techniques, avoiding the imposition of hard restrictions that can even lead to unfeasibility. This method results in models that are more flexible.

At a superficial level, the idea of maximum likelihood must be prehistoric: early hunters and gatherers may not have used the words ``method of maximum likelihood'' to describe their choice of where and how to hunt and gather, but it is hard to believe they would have been surprised if their method had been described in those terms. It seems a simple, even unassailable idea: Who would rise to argue in favor of a method of minimum likelihood, or even mediocre likelihood? And yet the mathematical history of the topic shows this ``simple idea'' is really anything but simple. Joseph Louis Lagrange, Daniel Bernoulli, Leonard Euler, Pierre Simon Laplace and Carl Friedrich Gauss are only some of those who explored the topic, not always in ways we would sanction today. In this article, that history is reviewed from back well before Fisher to the time of Lucien Le Cam's dissertation. In the process Fisher's unpublished 1930 characterization of conditions for the consistency and efficiency of maximum likelihood estimates is presented, and the mathematical basis of his three proofs discussed. In particular, Fisher's derivation of the information inequality is seen to be derived from his work on the analysis of variance, and his later approach via estimating functions was derived from Euler's Relation for homogeneous functions. The reaction to Fisher's work is reviewed, and some lessons drawn., Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/07-STS249 the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org)

The asymptotic risk of efficient estimators with Kullback–Leibler loss in smoothly parametrized statistical models is $k/2_n$, where $k$ is the parameter dimension and $n$ is the sample size. Under fairly general conditions, we given a simple information-theoretic proof that the set of parameter values where any arbitrary estimator is superefficient is negligible. The proof is based on a result of Rissanen that codes have asymptotic redundancy not smaller than $(k/2)\log n$, except in a set of measure 0.

For a particular pseudoloss function, local asymptotic minimaxity and admissibility in the sense of Hajek and Le Cam are studied when probability measures are replaced by certain capacities ($\epsilon$-contamination, total variation). A minimax bound for arbitrary estimator sequences is established, admissibility of minimax estimators is proved, and it is shown that minimax estimators must necessarily have an asymptotic expansion in terms of a truncated logarithmic derivative.