Adaptive conditional feature screening

A new joint screening method for right-censored time-to-event data with ultra-high dimensional covariates

In an ultra-high dimensional setting with a huge number of covariates, variable screening is useful for dimension reduction before applying a more refined method for model selection and statistical analysis. This paper proposes a new sure joint screening procedure for right-censored time-to-event data based on a sparsity-restricted semiparametric accelerated failure time model. Our method, referred to as Buckley-James assisted sure screening (BJASS), consists of an initial screening step using a sparsity-restricted least-squares estimate based on a synthetic time variable and a refinement screening step using a sparsity-restricted least-squares estimate with the Buckley-James imputed event times. The refinement step may be repeated several times to obtain more stable results. We show that with any fixed number of refinement steps, the BJASS procedure retains all important variables with probability tending to 1. Simulation results are presented to illustrate its performance in comparison with some marginal screening methods. Real data examples are provided using a diffuse large-B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) data and a breast cancer data. We have implemented the BJASS method using Matlab and made it available to readers through Github https://github.com/yiucla/BJASS .

Broken adaptive ridge regression and its asymptotic properties

This paper studies the asymptotic properties of a sparse linear regression estimator, referred to as broken adaptive ridge (BAR) estimator, resulting from an L 0-based iteratively reweighted L 2 penalization algorithm using the ridge estimator as its initial value. We show that the BAR estimator is consistent for variable selection and has an oracle property for parameter estimation. Moreover, we show that the BAR estimator possesses a grouping effect: highly correlated covariates are naturally grouped together, which is a desirable property not known for other oracle variable selection methods. Lastly, we combine BAR with a sparsity-restricted least squares estimator and give conditions under which the resulting two-stage sparse regression method is selection and estimation consistent in addition to having the grouping property in high- or ultrahigh-dimensional settings. Numerical studies are conducted to investigate and illustrate the operating characteristics of the BAR method in comparison with other methods.