Quantile-based Chernoff distance for truncated random variables

Several probability distributions such as power-Pareto distribution (see Gilchrist 2000 Gilchrist, W. 2000. Statistical modelling with quantile functions. Boca Raton, FL: Chapman and Hall/CRC.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar] and Hankin and Lee 2006 Hankin, R. K. S., and A. Lee. 2006. A new family of non-negative distributions. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Statistics 48:67–78.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), various forms of lambda distributions (see Ramberg and Schmeiser 1974 Ramberg, J. S., and B. W. Schmeiser. 1974. An appropriate method for generating asymmetric random variables. Communications of the ACM 17:78–82.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] and Freimer et al. 1988 Freimer, M., S. Mudholkar, G. Kollia, and C. T. Lin. 1988. A study of the generalized lambda family. Communications in Statistics - Theory and Methods 17:3547–67.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), Govindarajulu distribution (see Nair, Sankaran, and Vineshkumar 2012 Nair, U. N., P. G. Sankaran, and B. Vineshkumar. 2012. The Govindarajulu distribution: some properties and applications. Communications in Statistics—Theory and Methods 41:4391–406.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), etc., do not have manageable distribution functions, though they have tractable quantile functions. Hence, analytical study of the properties of Chernoff distance of two random variables associated with these distributions via traditional distribution function-based tool becomes difficult. To make this simple, in this paper, we introduce quantile-based Chernoff distance for (left or right) truncated random variables and study its various properties. Some useful bounds as well as characterization results are obtained.     

Convergence of weighted sums for sequences of pairwise NQD random variables

ABSTRACT

The authors discuss the convergence for weighted sums of pairwise negatively quadrant dependent (NQD) random variables and obtain some new results which extend and improve the result of Bai and Cheng (2000) Bai, Z.D., Cheng, P.E. (2000). Marcinkiewicz strong laws for linear statistics. Stat. Probab. Lett. 46:105–112.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]. In addition, we relax some restrictions of the conditions in their result. Some new methods are used in this article which differ from that of Bai and Cheng (2000) Bai, Z.D., Cheng, P.E. (2000). Marcinkiewicz strong laws for linear statistics. Stat. Probab. Lett. 46:105–112.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar].     

Asymptotics of maxima and sums for a type of strongly dependent isotropic Gaussian random fields

For a type of strongly dependent isotropic Gaussian random fields introduced by Mittal (1976 Mittal, Y. 1976. A class of isotropic covariances functions. Pacific Journal of Mathematics 64:517–38.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), the joint limiting distribution of the maximum and the sum for the Gaussian random fields is derived. The asymptotic relation between the maximum and sum of the continuous time strongly dependent isotropic Gaussian random fields and the maximum and sum of this fields sampled at discrete time points is also obtained.     

A Strong Limit Theorem for Weighted Sums of Negatively Dependent Random Variables

In this article, we establish a new complete convergence theorem for weighted sums of negatively dependent random variables. As corollaries, many results on the almost sure convergence and complete convergence for weighted sums of negatively dependent random variables are obtained. In particular, the results of Jing and Liang (2008 Jing, B.Y., Liang, H.Y. (2008). Strong limit theorems for weighted sums of negatively associated random variables. J. Theor. Probab. 21:890–909.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), Sung (2012 Sung, S.H. (2012). Complete convergence for weighted sums of negatively dependent random variables. Stat. Pap. 53:73–82.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), and Wu (2010) can be obtained.     

Combined estimating function for random coefficient models with correlated errors

ABSTRACT

Estimating functionshave been shown to be convenient to study inference for non linear time series models. Recently, Thavaneswaran et al. (2012 Thavaneswaran, A., Liang, Y., Frank, J. (2012). Inference for random coefficient volatility models. Stat. Probab. Lett. 82(12):2086–2090.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) used combined estimating functions to study inference for random coefficient autoregressive (RCA) models with generalized autoregressive heteroscedasticity errors. While most RCA modeling assumes that the random term and the error are independent, Chandra and Taniguchi (2001 Chandra, S.A., Taniguchi, M. (2001). Estimating functions for nonlinear time series models. Ann. Inst. Stat. Math 53(1):125–141.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) studied inference for RCA models with correlated errors using linear estimating functions. In this paper, we derive the quadratic estimating functions for the joint estimation of the conditional mean, variance, and correlation parameters of the RCA models with correlated errors.     

Baker- Lin-Huang Type Bivariate Distributions Based on Order Statistics

Baker (2008 Baker, R. (2008). An order-statistics-based method for constructing multivariate distributions with fixed marginals. J. Multivariate Anal. 99: 23122327.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) introduced a new class of bivariate distributions based on distributions of order statistics from two independent samples of size n. Lin and Huang (2010 Lin, G.D., Huang, J.S. (2010). A note on the maximum correlation for Baker’s bivariate distributions with fixed marginals. J. Multivariate Anal. 101: 22272233.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) discovered an important property of Baker’s distribution and showed that the Pearson’s correlation coefficient for this distribution converges to maximum attainable value, i.e., the correlation coefficient of the Fréchet upper bound, as n increases to infinity. Bairamov and Bayramoglu (2013 Bairamov, I., Bayramoglu, K. (2013). From Huang-Kotz distribution to Baker’s distribution. J. Multivariate Anal. 113: 106115.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) investigated a new class of bivariate distributions constructed by using Baker’s model and distributions of order statistics from dependent random variables, allowing higher correlation than that of Baker’s distribution. In this article, a new class of Baker’s type bivariate distributions with high correlation are constructed based on distributions of order statistics by using an arbitrary continuous copula instead of the product copula.     

An improved estimation in stratified random sampling

ABSTRACT

The article suggests a class of estimators of population mean in stratified random sampling using auxiliary information with its properties. In addition, various known estimators/classes of estimators are identified as members of the suggested class. It has been shown that the suggested class of estimators under optimum condition performs better than the usual unbiased, usual combined ratio, usual combined regression, Kadilar and Cingi (2005 Kadilar, C., Cingi, H. (2005). A new ratio estimator in stratified sampling. Commun. Stat. Theory Methods 34:597–602.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), Singh and Vishwakarma (2006 Singh, H.P., Vishwakarma, G.K. (2006). Combined ratio-product estimator of finite population mean in stratified sampling. Metodologia de Encuestas Monografico: Incidencias en el trabjo de Campo 7(1):32–40. [Google Scholar]) estimators and the members belonging to the classes of estimators envisaged by Kadilar and Cingi (2003 Kadilar, C., Cingi, H. (2003). Ratio estimator in stratified sampling. Biomet. J. 45:218–225.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), Singh, Tailor et al. (2008 Singh, H.P., Agnihotri, N. (2008). A general procedure of estimating population mean using auxiliary information in sample surveys. Stat. Trans. 9(1):71–87. [Google Scholar]), Singh et al. (2009 Singh, R., Kumar, M., Chaudhary, M.K., Kadilar, C. (2009). Improved exponential estimator in stratified random sampling. Pak. J. Stat. Oper. Res. 5(2):67–82.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), Singh and Vishwakarma (2010 Singh, H.P., Vishwakarma, G.K. (2010). A general procedure for estimating the population mean in stratified sampling using auxiliary information. METRON 67(1):47–65.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) and Koyuncu and Kadilar (2010) Koyuncu, N., Kadilar, C. (2010). On improvement in estimating population mean in stratified random sampling. J. Appl. Stat. 37(6):999–1013.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar].     

Complete convergence and complete moment convergence for arrays of rowwise negatively superadditive dependent random variables

In this paper, some complete convergence and complete moment convergence results for arrays of rowwise negatively superadditive dependent (NSD, in short) random variables are studied. The obtained theorems not only extend the result of Gan and Chen (2007 Gan, S. X., and P. Y. Chen. 2007. On the limiting behavior of the maximum partial sums for arrays of rowwise NA random variables. Acta Mathematica Scientia. Series B 27 (2):283–90.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) to the case of NSD random variables, but also improve them.     

Subjective Bayesian Analysis of the Elliptical Model

For the multivariate elliptical model subjective Bayesian estimators of the location vector and some functions of the characteristic matrix with the normal-inverse Wishart and the normal-Wishart as prior, respectively, are derived. Fang and Li (1999 Fang, K.T., Li, R.Z. (1999). Bayesian statistical inference on elliptical matrix distributions. J. Multivariate Anal. 70: 66–85.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) considered the elliptical model for Bayesian analysis for an objective prior structure. In addition, the newly developed results are applied to the multivariate normal- and t-distribution. A performance study is done to evaluate the normal-gamma and normal-inverse gamma distributions as suitable priors. A practical application for the posterior distributions of the multivariate t-distribution is included by means of Gibbs sampling and a Metropolis-Hastings algorithm.     

Admissibility of a variance estimator in finite population sampling under Warner's randomized response plan with multiple responses

ABSTRACT

Let P be the proportion of individuals in a finite population possessing a sensitive attribute. We consider the problem of unbiased estimation of (i) the variance of a linear unbiased estimator of P and (ii) the population variance P (1—P) for a given probability sampling design under Warner's (1965 Warner, S.L. (1965). Randomized response - A survey technique for eliminating evasive answer bias. J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 60:63–69.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) randomized response (RR) plan when independent responses are obtained from each sampled individual as many times as he/she is selected in the sample and prove the admissibility of a quadratic unbiased estimator for each.     

On General Continuous Triangular and Two-sided Power Distributions

In this article, we directly introduce the continuous version of the general discrete triangular distributions (Kokonendji and Zocchi, 2010 Kokonendji, C.C., Zocchi, S.S. (2010). Extensions of discrete triangular distribution and boundary bias in kernel estimation for discrete functions. Statist. Probab. Lett. 80:1655–1662.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). It is bounded and, in general, unimodal with pike. It contains thus a very useful class of two-sided power distributions (van Dorp and Kotz, 2002a Van Dorp, J.R., Kotz, S. (2002a). A novel extension of the triangular distribution and its parameter estimation. Statistician 51:1–17. [Google Scholar],b Van Dorp, J.R., Kotz, S. (2002b). The standard two-sided power distribution and its properties; with applications in financial engineering. Amer. Statistician 56:90–99.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2003 Van Dorp, J.R., Kotz, S. (2003). Generalization of two-sided power distributions and their convolution. Commun. Statist. Theor. Meth. 32:1703–1723.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Moments, particular cases, limit distributions, and relations between parameters are straightforwardly derived.     

Equivalent Conditions of Complete Moment Convergence of Weighted Sums for ϕ-Mixing Sequence of Random Variables

In this article, the complete moment convergence of weighted sums for ?-mixing sequence of random variables is investigated. By applying moment inequality and truncation methods, the equivalent conditions of complete moment convergence of weighted sums for ?-mixing sequence of random variables are established. These results promote and improve the corresponding results obtained by Li et al. (1995 Li, D.L., Rao, M.B., Jiang, T.F., Wang, X.C. (1995). Complete convergence and almost sure convergence of weighted sums of random variables. J. Theoret. Probab. 8:49–76.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and Gut (1993 Gut, A. (1993). Complete convergence and Cesàro summation for i.i.d. random variables. Probab. Theory Related Fields 97:169–178.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) from i.i.d. to ?-mixing setting. Moreover, we obtain the complete moment convergence of moving average processes based on ?-mixing random variables, which extends the result of Kim et al. (2008 Kim, T.S., Ko, M.H. (2008). Complete moment convergence of moving average processes under dependence assumptions. Statist. Probab. Lett. 78:839–846.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) in the sense that it does not require a specific mixing rate.     

EVALUATION OF POWER OF TESTS INVOLVING COVARIATES UNDER NONCONSTANT VARIANCE

In many experiments where pre-treatment and post-treatment measurements are taken, investigators wish to determine if there is a difference between two treatment groups. For this type of data, the post-treatment variable is used as the primary comparison variable and the pre-treatment variable is used as a covariate. Although most of the discussion in this paper is written with the pre-treatment variable as the covariate the results are applicable to other choices of a covariate. Tests based on residuals have been proposed as alternatives to the usual covariance methods. Our objective is to investigate how the powers of these tests are affected when the conditional variance of the post-treatment variable depends on the magnitude of the pre-treatment variable. In particular, we investigate two cases. [1] Crager, Michael R. 1987. Analysis of Covariance in Parallel-Group Clinical Trials With Pretreatment Baselines. Biometrics, 43: 895–901. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] The conditional variance of the post-treatment variable gradually increases as the magnitude of the pre-treatment variable increases. (In many biological models this is the case.) [2] Knoke, James D. 1991. Nonparametric Analysis of Covariance for Comparing Change in Randomized Studies with Baseline Values Subject to Error. Biometrics, 47: 523–533. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] The conditional variance of the post-treatment variable is dependent upon natural or imposed subgroups contained within the pre-treatment variable. Power comparisons are made using Monte Carlo techniques.     

A Universal Prior Distribution for Bayesian Consistency of Non parametric Procedures

The introduction of the Hausdorff α-entropy in Xing (2008a Xing, Y. (2008a). Convergence rates of posterior distributions for observations without the iid structure, 38 pages. Available at: www.arxiv.org:0811.4677v1. [Google Scholar]), Xing (2008b Xing, Y. (2008b). On adaptive Bayesian inference. Electron. J. Stat. 2:848–862.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), Xing (2010 Xing, Y. (2010). Rates of posterior convergence for iid Observations. Commun. Stat. Theory Methods. 39(19):3389–3398.[Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]), Xing (2011 Xing, Y. (2011). Convergence rates of nonparametric posterior distributions. J. Stat. Plann. Inference 141:3382–3390.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), and Xing and Ranneby (2009 Xing, Y., Ranneby, B. (2009). Sufficient conditions for Bayesian consistency. J. Stat. Plann. Inference. 139:2479–2489.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) has lead a series of improvements of well-known results on posterior consistency. In this paper we discuss an application of the Hausdorff α-entropy. We construct a universal prior distribution such that the corresponding posterior distribution is almost surely consistent. The approach of the construction of this type of prior distribution is natural, but it works very well for all separable models. We illustrate such prior distributions by examples. In particular, we obtain that if the true density function is known to be some normal probability density function with unknown mean and unknown variance then without any additional assumption one can construct a prior distribution which leads to posterior consistency.     

On Augmented Franses Tests for Seasonal Unit Roots

This article extends the results reported in del Barrio Castro, Osborn and Taylor (2012 del Barrio Castro, T., Osborn, D.R., Taylor, A. M.R. (2012). On augmented HEGY tests for seasonal unit roots. Econometric Theor. 18:1121–1143.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) to the approach followed by Franses (1991a Franses, P. H. (1991a). Model selection and seasonality in time series. Tibergen Institute Series, 18. [Google Scholar],b Franses, P.H. (1991b). Seasonality, non-stationarity and the forecasting of monthly time series. Int. J. Forecast. 7:199–208.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) to test for seasonal unit roots, providing the asymptotic representation to the seasonal unit roots tests proposed by Franses for a general number of seasons S.     

RAO'S STATISTIC FOR THE ANALYSIS OF UNIFORM ASSOCIATION IN CROSS-CLASSIFICATIONS

In this paper we introduce a new measure for the analysis of association in cross-classifications having ordered categories. Association is measured in terms of the odd-ratios in 2 × 2 subtables formed from adjacent rows and adjacent columns. We focus our attention in the uniform association model. Our measure is based in the family of divergences introduced by Burbea and Rao [1] Burbea, J. and Rao, C. R. 1982a. On the convexity of some divergence measures based on entropy functions. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 28: 489–495. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]. Some well-known sets of data are reanalyzed and a simulation study is presented to analyze the behavior of the new families of test statistics introduced in this paper.     

Group Variable Selection with Oracle Property by Weight-Fused Adaptive Elastic Net Model for Strongly Correlated Data

This paper is the generalization of weight-fused elastic net (Fu and Xu, 2012 Fu, G., Xu, Q. (2012). Grouping variable selection by weight fused elastic net for multi-collinear data. Communications in Statistics-Simulation and Computation 41(2):205–221.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), which performs group variable selection by combining weight-fused LASSO(wfLasso) and elastic net (Zou and Hastie, 2005 Zou, H., Hastie, T. (2005). Regularization and variable selection via the elastic net. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B (Statistical Methodology) 67(2):301–320.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) penalties. In this study, the elastic net penalty is replaced by adaptive elastic net penalty (AdaEnet) (Zou and Zhang, 2009 Zou, H., Zhang, H. (2009). On the adaptive elastic-net with a diverging number of parameters. Annals of Statistics 37(4):1733–1751.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), and a new group variable selection algorithm with oracle property (Fan and Li, 2001 Fan, J., Li, R. (2001). Variable selection via nonconcave penalized likelihood and its oracle properties. Journal of the American Statistical Association 96(456):1348–1360.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Zou, 2006 Zou, H. (2006). The adaptive lasso and its oracle properties. Journal of the American Statistical Association 101(476):1418–1429.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) is obtained.     

Generalized linear regression models incorporating original outcome distributions

ABSTRACT

In this article, we propose an approach for incorporating continuous and discrete original outcome distributions into the usual exponential family regression models. The new approach is an extension of the works of Suissa (1991 Suissa, S. (1991). Binary methods for continuous outcomes: A parametric alternative. J. Clin. Epidemiol. 44:241–248.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and Suissa and Blais (1995 Suissa, S., Blais, L. (1995). Binary regression with continuous outcomes. Stat. Med. 14:247–255.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), which present methods to estimate the risk of an event defined in a sample subspace of an original continuous outcome variable. Simulation studies are presented in order to illustrate the performance of the developed methodology. Real data sets are analyzed by using the proposed models.     

Restricted estimation and testing of hypothesis in linear measurement errors models

ABSTRACT

In this article, the linear models with measurement error both in the response and in the covariates are considered. Following Shalabh et al. (2007 Shalabh, Garg, G., Misra, N. (2007). Restricted regression estimation in measurement error models. Comput. Stat. Data Anal. 52:1149–1166.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2009 Shalabh, Garg, G., Misra, N. (2009). Use of prior information in the consistent estimation of regression coefficients in measurement error models. J. Multivariate Anal. 100:1498–1520.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), we propose several restricted estimators for the regression coefficients. The consistency and asymptotic normality of the restricted estimators are established. Furthermore, we also discuss the superiority of the restricted estimators to unrestricted estimators under Pitman closeness criterion. We also develop several variance estimators and establish their asymptotic distributions. Wald-type statistics are constructed for testing the linear restrictions. Finally, Monte Carlo simulations are conducted to illustrate the finite-sample properties of the proposed estimators.     

A stratified Tracy and Osahan's two-stage randomized response model

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes an alternative two-stage stratified randomized response model based on Tracy and Osahan (1999 Tracy, D.S., Osahan, S.S. (1999). An improved randomized response technique. Pak. J. Stat. 15(1):1–6. [Google Scholar]) model that has an optimal allocation and large gain in precision. It is also shown that the proposed model is more efficient than Kim and Warde (2004 Kim, J., Warde, W. (2004). A stratified Warner randomized response model. J. Stat. Plan. Infer. 120:155–165.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and Kim and Elam (2005 Kim, J.M., Elam, M.E. (2005). A two-stage stratified Warner's randomized response model using optimal allocation. Metrika 61:1–7.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) stratified randomized response models under the conditions presented in both the cases of completely truthful reporting and that of not completely truthful reporting by the respondents. Numerical illustrations and graphs are also given in support of the present study.