Research Seminar
Seminar: Panning for gold: Model-free knockoffs for high-dimensional controlled variable selection
| Abstract: | Many contemporary large-scale applications involve building interpretable models linking a large set of potential covariates to a response in a nonlinear fashion, such as when the response is binary. Although this modeling problem has been extensively studied, it remains unclear how to effectively control the fraction of false discoveries even in high-dimensional logistic regression, not to mention general high-dimensional nonlinear models. To address such a practical problem, we propose a new framework of \textit{model-free} knockoffs, which reads from a different perspective the knockoff procedure (Barber and Candès, 2015) originally designed for controlling the false discovery rate in linear models. The key innovation of our method is to construct knockoff variables probabilistically instead of geometrically. This enables model-free knockoffs to deal with arbitrary (and unknown) conditional models and any dimensions, including when the dimensionality $p$ exceeds the sample size $n$, while the original knockoffs procedure is constrained to homoscedastic linear models with $n \ge p$. Our approach requires the design matrix be random (independent and identically distributed rows) with a covariate distribution that is known, although we show our procedure to be robust to unknown/estimated distributions. To our knowledge, no other procedure solves the \textit{controlled} variable selection problem in such generality, but in the restricted settings where competitors exist, we demonstrate the superior power of knockoffs through simulations. Finally, we apply our procedure to data from a case-control study of Crohn's disease in the United Kingdom, making twice as many discoveries as the original analysis of the same data. This is a joint work with Emmanuel Candès, Yingying Fan and Lucas Janson. |
| Date: | Jun 5 (Mon), 2017 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm |
| Time: | 3:00PM - 5:00PM |
| Speaker: |
Dr Jinchi Lv Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California |
| Venue: | Room 7-208, 7/F, Lau Ming Wai Academic Building |
+852 3442-8989
+852 3442-0151
