In this study, we introduce a novel methodological framework called Bayesian Penalized Empirical Likelihood (BPEL), designed to address the computational challenges inherent in empirical likelihood (EL) approaches. Our approach has two primary objectives: (i) to enhance the inherent flexibility of EL in accommodating diverse model conditions, and (ii) to facilitate the use of well-established Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling schemes as a convenient alternative to the complex optimization typically required for statistical inference using EL. To achieve the first objective, we propose a penalized approach that regularizes the Lagrange multipliers, significantly reducing the dimensionality of the problem while accommodating a comprehensive set of model conditions. For the second objective, our study designs and thoroughly investigates two popular sampling schemes within the BPEL context. We demonstrate that the BPEL framework is highly flexible and efficient, enhancing the adaptability and practicality of EL methods. Our study highlights the practical advantages of using sampling techniques over traditional optimization methods for EL problems, showing rapid convergence to the global optima of posterior distributions and ensuring the effective resolution of complex statistical inference challenges.

We propose a two-step procedure to model and predict high-dimensional functional time series, where the number of function-valued time series p is large in relation to the length of time series n. Our first step performs an eigenanalysis of a positive definite matrix, which leads to a one-to-one linear transformation for the original high-dimensional functional time series, and the transformed curve series can be segmented into several groups such that any two subseries from any two different groups are uncorrelated both contemporaneously and serially. Consequently in our second step those groups are handled separately without the information loss on the overall linear dynamic structure. The second step is devoted to establishing a finite-dimensional dynamical structure for all the transformed functional time series within each group. Furthermore the finite-dimensional structure is represented by that of a vector time series. Modeling and forecasting for the original high-dimensional functional time series are realized via those for the vector time series in all the groups. We investigate the theoretical properties of our proposed methods, and illustrate the finite-sample performance through both extensive simulation and two real datasets. Supplementary materials for this article are available online, including a standardized description of the materials available for reproducing the work.

Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (HSIC) has recently been introduced to the field of single-index models to estimate the directions. Compared with other well-established methods, the HSIC based method requires relatively weak conditions. However, its performance has not yet been studied in the prevalent high-dimensional scenarios, where the number of covariates can be much larger than the sample size. In this article, based on HSIC, we propose to estimate the possibly sparse directions
in the high-dimensional single-index models through a parameter reformulation. Our approach estimates the subspace of the direction directly and performs variable selection simultaneously. Due to the non-convexity of the objective function and the complexity of the constraints, a majorize-minimize algorithm together with the linearized alternating direction method of multipliers is developed to solve the optimization problem. Since it does not involve the inverse of the covariance matrix,
the algorithm can naturally handle large p small n scenarios. Through extensive simulation studies and a real data analysis, we show that our proposal is efficient and effective in the high-dimensional settings. The Matlab codes for this method are available online.

We consider high-dimensional measurement errors with high-frequency data. Our objective is on recovering the high-dimensional cross-sectional covariance matrix of the random errors with optimality. In this problem, not all components of the random vector are observed at the same time and the measurement errors are latent variables, leading to major challenges besides high data dimensionality.

Many scientific and economic applications involve the statistical learning of high-dimensional functional time series, where the number of functional variables is comparable to, or even greater than, the number of serially dependent functional observations. In this paper, we model observed functional time series, which are subject to errors in the sense that each functional datum arises as the sum of two uncorrelated components, one dynamic and one white noise. Motivated from the fact that the autocovariance function of observed functional time series automatically filters out the noise term, we propose a three-step framework by first performing autocovariance-based dimension reduction, then formulating a novel autocovariance-based block regularized minimum distance estimation to produce block sparse estimates, and based on which obtaining the final functional sparse estimates. We investigate theoretical properties of the proposed estimators, and illustrate the proposed estimation procedure with the corresponding convergence analysis via three sparse high-dimensional functional time series models. We demonstrate via both simulated and real datasets that our proposed estimators significantly outperform their competitors.

A standing challenge in data privacy is the trade-off between the level of privacy and the efficiency of statistical inference. Here we conduct an in-depth study of this trade-off for parameter estimation in the β-model (Chatterjee, Diaconis and Sly, 2011) for edge differentially private network data released via jittering (Karwa, Krivitsky and Slavkovic´, 2017).

Statistical analysis of multimodal imaging data is a challenging task, since the data involves high-dimensionality, strong spatial correlations and complex data structures. In this article, we propose rigorous statistical testing procedures for making inferences on the complex dependence of multimodal imaging data. Motivated by the analysis of multi-task fMRI data in the Human Connectome Project (HCP) study, we particularly address three hypothesis testing problems: (a) testing independence among imaging modalities over brain regions, (b) testing independence between brain regions within imaging modalities, and (c)testing independence between brain regions across different modalities. Considering a general form for all the three tests, we develop a global testing procedure and a multiple testing procedure controlling the false discovery rate. We study theoretical properties of the proposed tests and develop a computationally efficient distributed algorithm. The proposed methods and theory are general and relevant for many statistical problems of testing independence structure among the components of high-dimensional random vectors with arbitrary dependence structures. We also illustrate our proposed methods via extensive simulations and analysis of five task fMRI contrast maps in the HCP study. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.