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Variable screening has been a useful research area that deals with ultrahigh-dimensional data. When there exist both marginally and jointly dependent predictors to the response, existing methods such as conditional screening or iterative screening often suffer from instability against the selection of the conditional set or the computational burden, respectively. In this article, we propose a new independence measure, named conditional martingale difference divergence (CMDH), that can be treated as either a conditional or a marginal independence measure. Under regularity conditions, we show that the sure screening property of CMDH holds for both marginally and jointly active variables. Based on this measure, we propose a kernel-based model-free variable screening method, which is efficient, flexible, and stable against high correlation among predictors and heterogeneity of the response. In addition, we provide a data-driven method to select the conditional set. In simulations and real data applications, we demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method.

In the multiple linear regression setting, we propose a general framework, termed weighted orthogonal components regression (WOCR), which encompasses many known methods as special cases, including ridge regression and principal components regression. WOCR makes use of the monotonicity inherent in orthogonal components to parameterize the weight function. The formulation allows for efficient determination of tuning parameters and hence is computationally advantageous. Moreover, WOCR offers insights for deriving new better variants. Specifically, we advocate weighting components based on their correlations with the response, which leads to enhanced predictive performance. Both simulated studies and real data examples are provided to assess and illustrate the advantages of the proposed methods., Comment: 22 pages, 4 figures

We introduce a new sufficient dimension reduction framework that targets a statistical functional of interest, and propose an efficient estimator for the semiparametric estimation problems of this type. The statistical functional covers a wide range of applications, such as conditional mean, conditional variance and conditional quantile. We derive the general forms of the efficient score and efficient information as well as their specific forms for three important statistical functionals: the linear functional, the composite linear functional and the implicit functional. In conjunction with our theoretical analysis, we also propose a class of one-step Newton-Raphson estimators and show by simulations that they substantially outperform existing methods. Finally, we apply the new method to construct the central mean and central variance subspaces for a data set involving the physical measurements and age of abalones, which exhibits a strong pattern of heteroscedasticity., Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/13-AOS1195 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org)

We introduce a class of dimension reduction estimators based on an ensemble of the minimum average variance estimates of functions that characterize the central subspace, such as the characteristic functions, the Box--Cox transformations and wavelet basis. The ensemble estimators exhaustively estimate the central subspace without imposing restrictive conditions on the predictors, and have the same convergence rate as the minimum average variance estimates. They are flexible and easy to implement, and allow repeated use of the available sample, which enhances accuracy. They are applicable to both univariate and multivariate responses in a unified form. We establish the consistency and convergence rate of these estimators, and the consistency of a cross validation criterion for order determination. We compare the ensemble estimators with other estimators in a wide variety of models, and establish their competent performance., Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-AOS950 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org)

We consider a general nonlinear regression problem where the predictors contain measurement error. It has been recently discovered that several well-known dimension reduction methods, such as OLS, SIR and pHd, can be performed on the surrogate regression problem to produce consistent estimates for the original regression problem involving the unobserved true predictor. In this paper we establish a general invariance law between the surrogate and the original dimension reduction spaces, which implies that, at least at the population level, the two dimension reduction problems are in fact equivalent. Consequently we can apply all existing dimension reduction methods to measurement error regression problems. The equivalence holds exactly for multivariate normal predictors, and approximately for arbitrary predictors. We also characterize the rate of convergence for the surrogate dimension reduction estimators. Finally, we apply several dimension reduction methods to real and simulated data sets involving measurement error to compare their performances., Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009053607000000172 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org)