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Theory and Methods

Category-Adaptive Variable Screening for Ultra-High Dimensional Heterogeneous Categorical Data

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Pages 747-760 | Received 26 Nov 2017, Accepted 03 Jan 2019, Published online: 22 Apr 2019
 

Abstract

The populations of interest in modern studies are very often heterogeneous. The population heterogeneity, the qualitative nature of the outcome variable and the high dimensionality of the predictors pose significant challenge in statistical analysis. In this article, we introduce a category-adaptive screening procedure with high-dimensional heterogeneous data, which is to detect category-specific important covariates. The proposal is a model-free approach without any specification of a regression model and an adaptive procedure in the sense that the set of active variables is allowed to vary across different categories, thus making it more flexible to accommodate heterogeneity. For response-selective sampling data, another main discovery of this article is that the proposed method works directly without any modification. Under mild regularity conditions, the newly procedure is shown to possess the sure screening and ranking consistency properties. Simulation studies contain supportive evidence that the proposed method performs well under various settings and it is effective to extract category-specific information. Applications are illustrated with two real datasets. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

Acknowledgment

The authors are indebted to the Editor, the Associate Editor, and four anonymous reviewers for their professional review and insightful comments that lead to significant improvements in the article.

Additional information

Funding

Yuanyuan Lin’s research is supported by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (Grants No. 509413 and 14311916), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71874028), and Direct Grants for Research, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Xiaodong Yan’s research is supported by the Young Scholars Program of Shandong University (YSPSDU: 11020088964008). Niansheng Tang’s research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 11671349) and the Key Projects of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 11731101).

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