Modern Stochastics: Theory and Applications

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a classical technique of dimension reduction for multivariate data. When the data are a mixture of subjects from different subpopulations one can be interested in PCA of some (or each) subpopulation separately. In this paper estimators are considered for PC directions and corresponding eigenvectors of subpopulations in the nonparametric model of mixture with varying concentrations. Consistency and asymptotic normality of obtained estimators are proved. These results allow one to construct confidence sets for the PC model parameters. Performance of such confidence intervals for the leading eigenvalues is investigated via simulations.

A multivariate errors-in-variables (EIV) model with an intercept term, and a polynomial EIV model are considered. Focus is made on a structural homoskedastic case, where vectors of covariates are i.i.d. and measurement errors are i.i.d. as well. The covariates contaminated with errors are normally distributed and the corresponding classical errors are also assumed normal. In both models, it is shown that (inconsistent) ordinary least squares estimators of regression parameters yield an a.s. approximation to the best prediction of response given the values of observable covariates. Thus, not only in the linear EIV, but in the polynomial EIV models as well, consistent estimators of regression parameters are useless in the prediction problem, provided the size and covariance structure of observation errors for the predicted subject do not differ from those in the data used for the model fitting.

In this paper we develop a general framework for quantifying how binary risk factors jointly influence a binary outcome. Our key result is an additive expansion of odds ratios as a sum of marginal effects and interaction terms of varying order. These odds ratio expansions are used for estimating the excess odds ratio, attributable proportion and synergy index for a case-control dataset by means of maximum likelihood from a logistic regression model. The confidence intervals associated with these estimates of joint effects and interaction of risk factors rely on the delta method. Our methodology is illustrated with a large Nordic meta dataset for multiple sclerosis. It combines four studies, with a total of 6265 cases and 8401 controls. It has three risk factors (smoking and two genetic factors) and a number of other confounding variables.

We consider the Berkson model of logistic regression with Gaussian and homoscedastic error in regressor. The measurement error variance can be either known or unknown. We deal with both functional and structural cases. Sufficient conditions for identifiability of regression coefficients are presented.