Jean‐Marc Azäis

Jean-Marc Azaïs, Federico Dalmao, Yohann De Castro

In this article, we introduce the novel concept of the second maximum of a Gaussian random field on a Riemannian submanifold. This second maximum serves as a powerful tool for characterizing the distribution of the maximum. By utilizing an ad-hoc Kac Rice formula, we derive the explicit form of the maximum's distribution, conditioned on the second maximum and some regressed component of the Riemannian Hessian. This approach results in an exact test, based on the evaluation of spacing between these maxima, which we refer to as the spacing test. We investigate the applicability of this test in detecting sparse alternatives within Gaussian symmetric tensors, continuous sparse deconvolution, and two-layered neural networks with smooth rectifiers. Our theoretical results are supported by numerical experiments, which illustrate the calibration and power of the proposed tests. More generally, this test can be applied to any Gaussian random field on a Riemannian manifold, and we provide a general framework for the application of the spacing test in continuous sparse kernel regression. Furthermore, when the variance-covariance function of the Gaussian random field is known up to a scaling factor, we derive an exact Studentized version of our test, coined the $t$-spacing test. This test is perfectly calibrated under the null hypothesis and has high power for detecting sparse alternatives.

J. -M. Azaïs, Y. De Castro

We investigate multiple testing and variable selection using the Least Angle Regression (LARS) algorithm in high dimensions under the assumption of Gaussian noise. LARS is known to produce a piecewise affine solution path with change points referred to as the knots of the LARS path. The key to our results is an expression in closed form of the exact joint law of a $K$-tuple of knots conditional on the variables selected by LARS, namely the so-called post-selection joint law of the LARS knots. Numerical experiments demonstrate the perfect fit of our findings. This paper makes three main contributions. First, we build testing procedures on variables entering the model along the LARS path in the general design case when the noise level can be unknown. These testing procedures are referred to as the Generalized $t$-Spacing tests (GtSt) and we prove that they have an exact non-asymptotic level (i.e., the Type I error is exactly controlled). This extends work of (Taylor et al., 2014) where the spacing test works for consecutive knots and known variance. Second, we introduce a new exact multiple false negatives test after model selection in the general design case when the noise level may be unknown. We prove that this testing procedure has exact non-asymptotic level for general design and unknown noise level. Third, we give an exact control of the false discovery rate under orthogonal design assumption. Monte Carlo simulations and a real data experiment are provided to illustrate our results in this case. Of independent interest, we introduce an equivalent formulation of the LARS algorithm based on a recursive function.

Jiali Mei, Yohann De Castro, Yannig Goude et al.

Motivated by the reconstruction and the prediction of electricity consumption, we extend Nonnegative Matrix Factorization~(NMF) to take into account side information (column or row features). We consider general linear measurement settings, and propose a framework which models non-linear relationships between features and the response variables. We extend previous theoretical results to obtain a sufficient condition on the identifiability of the NMF in this setting. Based the classical Hierarchical Alternating Least Squares~(HALS) algorithm, we propose a new algorithm (HALSX, or Hierarchical Alternating Least Squares with eXogeneous variables) which estimates the factorization model. The algorithm is validated on both simulated and real electricity consumption datasets as well as a recommendation dataset, to show its performance in matrix recovery and prediction for new rows and columns.