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Summary Researchers sometimes have a priori information on the relative importance of predictors that can be used to screen out covariates. An important question is whether any of the discarded covariates have predictive power when the most relevant predictors are included in the model. We consider testing whether any discarded covariate is significant conditional on some pre-chosen covariates. We propose a maximum-type test statistic and show that it has a nonstandard asymptotic distribution, giving rise to the conditional adaptive resampling test. To accommodate signals of unknown sparsity, we develop a hybrid test statistic, which is a weighted average of maximum- and sum-type statistics. We prove the consistency of the test procedure under general assumptions and illustrate how it can be used as a stopping rule in forward regression. We show, through simulation, that the proposed method provides adequate control of the familywise error rate with competitive power for both sparse and dense signals, even in high-dimensional cases, and we demonstrate its advantages in cases where the covariates are heavily correlated. We illustrate the application of our method by analysing an expression quantitative trait locus dataset.

We study estimation in quantile regression when covariates are measured with errors. Existing methods require stringent assumptions, such as spherically symmetric joint distribution of the regression and measurement error variables, or linearity of all quantile functions, which restrict model flexibility and complicate computation. In this paper, we develop a new estimation approach based on corrected scores to account for a class of covariate measurement errors in quantile regression. The proposed method is simple to implement. Its validity requires only linearity of the particular quantile function of interest, and it requires no parametric assumptions on the regression error distributions. Finite-sample results demonstrate that the proposed estimators are more efficient than the existing methods in various models considered. Copyright 2012, Oxford University Press.

We propose a new approach for analyzing skewed and heteroscedastic health care cost data through regression of the conditional quantiles of the transformed cost. Using the appealing equivariance property of quantiles to monotone transformations, we propose a distribution-free estimator of the conditional mean cost on the original scale. The proposed method is extended to a two-part heteroscedastic model to account for zero costs commonly seen in health care cost studies. Simulation studies indicate that the proposed estimator has competitive and more robust performance than existing estimators in various heteroscedastic models. Copyright 2010, Oxford University Press.