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Quantifying the heterogeneity is an important issue in meta-analysis, and among the existing measures, the $I^2$ statistic is most commonly used. In this paper, we first illustrate with a simple example that the $I^2$ statistic is heavily dependent on the study sample sizes, mainly because it is used to quantify the heterogeneity between the observed effect sizes. To reduce the influence of sample sizes, we introduce an alternative measure that aims to directly measure the heterogeneity between the study populations involved in the meta-analysis. We further propose a new estimator, namely the $I_A^2$ statistic, to estimate the newly defined measure of heterogeneity. For practical implementation, the exact formulas of the $I_A^2$ statistic are also derived under two common scenarios with the effect size as the mean difference (MD) or the standardized mean difference (SMD). Simulations and real data analysis demonstrate that the $I_A^2$ statistic provides an asymptotically unbiased estimator for the absolute heterogeneity between the study populations, and it is also independent of the study sample sizes as expected. To conclude, our newly defined $I_A^2$ statistic can be used as a supplemental measure of heterogeneity to monitor the situations where the study effect sizes are indeed similar with little biological difference. In such scenario, the fixed-effect model can be appropriate; nevertheless, when the sample sizes are sufficiently large, the $I^2$ statistic may still increase to 1 and subsequently suggest the random-effects model for meta-analysis., Comment: 40 pages, 7 figures and 3 tables

Generalized additive partial linear models (GAPLMs) are appealing for model interpretation and prediction. However, for GAPLMs, the covariates and the degree of smoothing in the nonparametric parts are often difficult to determine in practice. To address this model selection uncertainty issue, we develop a computationally feasible model averaging (MA) procedure. The model weights are data-driven and selected based on multifold cross-validation (CV) (instead of leave-one-out) for computational saving. When all the candidate models are misspecified, we show that the proposed MA estimator for GAPLMs is asymptotically optimal in the sense of achieving the lowest possible Kullback-Leibler loss. In the other scenario where the candidate model set contains at least one correct model, the weights chosen by the multifold CV are asymptotically concentrated on the correct models. As a by-product, we propose a variable importance measure to quantify the importances of the predictors in GAPLMs based on the MA weights. It is shown to be able to asymptotically identify the variables in the true model. Moreover, when the number of candidate models is very large, a model screening method is provided. Numerical experiments show the superiority of the proposed MA method over some existing model averaging and selection methods.

Interaction selection for linear regression models with both continuous and categorical predictors is useful in many fields of modern science, yet very challenging when the number of predictors is relatively large. Existing interaction selection methods focus on finding one optimal model. While attractive properties such as consistency and oracle property have been well established for such methods, they actually may perform poorly in terms of stability for high-dimensional data, and they do not typically deal with categorical predictors. In this paper, we introduce a variable importance based interaction modeling (VIBIM) procedure for learning interactions in a linear regression model with both continuous and categorical predictors. It delivers multiple strong candidate models with high stability and interpretability. Simulation studies demonstrate its good finite sample performance. We apply the VIBIM procedure to a Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) data used in Tian et al. (2020) and measure the effects of relevant factors, including transmission control measures on the spread of COVID-19. We show that the VIBIM approach leads to better models in terms of interpretability, stability, reliability and prediction.

Data analysis based on information from several sources is common in economic and biomedical studies. This setting is often referred to as the data fusion problem, which differs from traditional missing data problems since no complete data is observed for any subject. We consider a regression analysis when the outcome variable and some covariates are collected from two different sources. By leveraging the common variables observed in both data sets, doubly robust estimation procedures are proposed in the literature to protect against possible model misspecifications. However, they employ only a single propensity score model for the data fusion process and a single imputation model for the covariates available in one data set. It may be questionable to assume that either model is correctly specified in practice. We therefore propose an approach that calibrates multiple propensity score and imputation models to gain more protection based on empirical likelihood methods. The resulting estimator is consistent when any one of those models is correctly specified and is robust against extreme values of the fitted propensity scores. We also establish its asymptotic normality property and discuss the semiparametric estimation efficiency. Simulation studies show that the proposed estimator has substantial advantages over existing doubly robust estimators, and an assembled U.S. household expenditure data example is used for illustration.

We design a system for risk-analyzing and pricing portfolios of non-performing consumer credit loans. The rapid development of credit lending business for consumers heightens the need for trading portfolios formed by overdue loans as a manner of risk transferring. However, the problem is nontrivial technically and related research is absent. We tackle the challenge by building a bottom-up architecture, in which we model the distribution of every single loan's repayment rate, followed by modeling the distribution of the portfolio's overall repayment rate. To address the technical issues encountered, we adopt the approaches of simultaneous quantile regression, R-copula, and Gaussian one-factor copula model. To our best knowledge, this is the first study that successfully adopts a bottom-up system for analyzing credit portfolio risks of consumer loans. We conduct experiments on a vast amount of data and prove that our methodology can be applied successfully in real business tasks., Comment: Accepted by 2nd ACM International Conference on AI in Finance (ICAIF'21)

This paper is concerned with the problem of comparing the population means of two groups of independent observations. An approximate randomization test procedure based on the test statistic of Chen and Qin (2010) is proposed. The asymptotic behavior of the test statistic as well as the randomized statistic is studied under weak conditions. In our theoretical framework, observations are not assumed to be identically distributed even within groups. No condition on the eigenstructure of the covariance matrices is imposed. And the sample sizes of the two groups are allowed to be unbalanced. Under general conditions, all possible asymptotic distributions of the test statistic are obtained. We derive the asymptotic level and local power of the approximate randomization test procedure. Our theoretical results show that the proposed test procedure can adapt to all possible asymptotic distributions of the test statistic and always has correct test level asymptotically. Also, the proposed test procedure has good power behavior. Our numerical experiments show that the proposed test procedure has favorable performance compared with several alternative test procedures., Comment: 52 pages. To appear in Biometrika

Skew normal mixture models provide a more flexible framework than the popular normal mixtures for modelling heterogeneous data with asymmetric behaviors. Due to the unboundedness of likelihood function and the divergency of shape parameters, the maximum likelihood estimators of the parameters of interest are often not well defined, leading to dissatisfactory inferential process. We put forward a proposal to deal with these issues simultaneously in the context of penalizing the likelihood function. The resulting penalized maximum likelihood estimator is proved to be strongly consistent when the putative order of mixture is equal to or larger than the true one. We also provide penalized EM-type algorithms to compute penalized estimators. Finite sample performances are examined by simulations and real data applications and the comparison to the existing methods.