Three-Toed Sloth

Changing How Changes Change (Next Week at the Statistics Seminar)

Attention conservation notice: Only of interest if you (1) care about covariance matrices and (2) will be in Pittsburgh on Monday.

Since so much of multivariate statistics depends on patterns of correlation among variables, it is a bit awkward to have to admit that in lots of practical contexts, correlations matrices are just not very stable, and can change quite drastically. (Some people pay a lot to rediscover this.) It turns out that there are more constructive responses to this situation than throwing up one's hands and saying "that sucks", and on Monday a friend of the department and general brilliant-type-person will be kind enough to tell us about them:

Emily Fox, "Bayesian Covariance Regression and Autoregression"

Abstract: Many inferential tasks, such as analyzing the functional connectivity of the brain via coactivation patterns or capturing the changing correlations amongst a set of assets for portfolio optimization, rely on modeling a covariance matrix whose elements evolve as a function of time. A number of multivariate heteroscedastic time series models have been proposed within the econometrics literature, but are typically limited by lack of clear margins, computational intractability, and curse of dimensionality. In this talk, we first introduce and explore a new class of time series models for covariance matrices based on a constructive definition exploiting inverse Wishart distribution theory. The construction yields a stationary, first-order autoregressive (AR) process on the cone of positive semi-definite matrices.

We then turn our focus to more general predictor spaces and scaling to high-dimensional datasets. Here, the predictor space could represent not only time, but also space or other factors. Our proposed Bayesian nonparametric covariance regression framework harnesses a latent factor model representation. In particular, the predictor-dependent factor loadings are characterized as a sparse combination of a collection of unknown dictionary functions (e.g., Gaussian process random functions). The induced predictor-dependent covariance is then a regularized quadratic function of these dictionary elements. Our proposed framework leads to a highly-flexible, but computationally tractable formulation with simple conjugate posterior updates that can readily handle missing data. Theoretical properties are discussed and the methods are illustrated through an application to the Google Flu Trends data and the task of word classification based on single-trial MEG data.

Time and place: 4--5 pm on Monday, 30 January 2012, in Scaife Hall 125

As always, the talk is free and open to the public.

Enigmas of Chance