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A method of constructing Markov chains on finite state spaces is provided. The chain is specified by three constraints: stationarity, dependence and marginal distributions. The generalized Pythagorean theorem in information geometry plays a central role in the construction. An algorithm for obtaining the desired Markov chain is described. Integer-valued autoregressive processes are considered for illustration., Comment: 20 pages, 2 figures

For a bivariate probability distribution, local dependence around a single point on the support is often formulated as the second derivative of the logarithm of the probability density function. However, this definition lacks the invariance under marginal distribution transformations, which is often required as a criterion for dependence measures. In this study, we examine the \textit{relative local dependence}, which we define as the ratio of the local dependence to the probability density function, for copulas. By using this notion, we point out that typical copulas can be characterised as the solutions to the corresponding partial differential equations, particularly highlighting that the relative local dependence of the Frank copula remains constant. The estimation and visualization of the relative local dependence are demonstrated using simulation data. Furthermore, we propose a class of copulas where local dependence is proportional to the $k$-th power of the probability density function, and as an example, we demonstrate a newly discovered relationship derived from the density functions of two representative copulas, the Frank copula and the Farlie-Gumbel-Morgenstern (FGM) copula., Comment: 25 pages,6 figures

In dependence modeling, various copulas have been utilized. Among them, the Frank copula has been one of the most typical choices due to its simplicity. In this work, we demonstrate that the Frank copula is the minimum information copula under fixed Kendall's $\tau$ (MICK), both theoretically and numerically. First, we explain that both MICK and the Frank density follow the hyperbolic Liouville equation. Moreover, we show that the copula density satisfying the Liouville equation is uniquely the Frank copula. Our result asserts that selecting the Frank copula as an appropriate copula model is equivalent to using Kendall's $\tau$ as the sole available information about the true distribution, based on the entropy maximization principle., Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures

Copulas have gained widespread popularity as statistical models to represent dependence structures between multiple variables in various applications. The minimum information copula, given a finite number of constraints in advance, emerges as the copula closest to the uniform copula when measured in Kullback-Leibler divergence. In prior research, the focus has predominantly been on constraints related to expectations on moments, including Spearman's $\rho$. This approach allows for obtaining the copula through convex programming. However, the existing framework for minimum information copulas does not encompass non-linear constraints such as Kendall's $\tau$. To address this limitation, we introduce MICK, a novel minimum information copula under fixed Kendall's $\tau$. We first characterize MICK by its local dependence property. Despite being defined as the solution to a non-convex optimization problem, we demonstrate that the uniqueness of this copula is guaranteed when the correlation is sufficiently small. Additionally, we provide numerical insights into applying MICK to real financial data., Comment: 35 pages, 10 figures, 4 tables

The paper considers the distribution of a general linear combination of central and non-central chi-square random variables by exploring the branch cut regions that appear in the standard Laplace inversion process. Due to the original interest from the directional statistics, the focus of this paper is on the density function of such distributions and not on their cumulative distribution function. In fact, our results confirm that the latter is a special case of the former. Our approach provides new insight by generating alternative characterizations of the probability density function in terms of a finite number of feasible univariate integrals. In particular, the central cases seem to allow an interesting representation in terms of the branch cuts, while general degrees of freedom and non-centrality can be easily adopted using recursive differentiation. Numerical results confirm that the proposed approach works well while more transparency and therefore easier control in the accuracy is ensured.

Phylogenetic trees are key data objects in biology, and the method of phylogenetic reconstruction has been highly developed. The space of phylogenetic trees is a nonpositively curved metric space. Recently, statistical methods to analyze the set of trees on this space are being developed utilizing this property. Meanwhile, in Euclidean space, the log-concave maximum likelihood method has emerged as a new nonparametric method for probability density estimation. In this paper, we derive a sufficient condition for the existence and uniqueness of the log-concave maximum likelihood estimator on tree space. We also propose an estimation algorithm for one and two dimensions. Since various factors affect the inferred trees, it is difficult to specify the distribution of sample trees. The class of log-concave densities is nonparametric, and yet the estimation can be conducted by the maximum likelihood method without selecting hyperparameters. We compare the estimation performance with a previously developed kernel density estimator numerically. In our examples where the true density is log-concave, we demonstrate that our estimator has a smaller integrated squared error when the sample size is large. We also conduct numerical experiments of clustering using the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm and compare the results with k-means++ clustering using Fr\'echet mean., Comment: 41 pages, 10 figures

We propose a method to construct a joint statistical model for mixed-domain data to analyze their dependence. Multivariate Gaussian and log-linear models are particular examples of the proposed model. It is shown that the functional equation defining the model has a unique solution under fairly weak conditions. The model is characterized by two orthogonal parameters: the dependence parameter and the marginal parameter. To estimate the dependence parameter, a conditional inference together with a sampling procedure is proposed and is shown to provide a consistent estimator. Illustrative examples of data analyses involving penguins and earthquakes are presented., Comment: 41 pages, 3 figures

Multi-dimensional distributions whose marginal distributions are uniform are called copulas. Among them, the one that satisfies given constraints on expectation and is closest to the independent distribution in the sense of Kullback-Leibler divergence is called the minimum information copula. The density function of the minimum information copula contains a set of functions called the normalizing functions, which are often difficult to compute. Although a number of proper scoring rules for probability distributions having normalizing constants such as exponential families are proposed, these scores are not applicable to the minimum information copulas due to the normalizing functions. In this paper, we propose the conditional Kullback-Leibler score, which avoids computation of the normalizing functions. The main idea of its construction is to use pairs of observations. We show that the proposed score is strictly proper in the space of copula density functions and therefore the estimator derived from it has asymptotic consistency. Furthermore, the score is convex with respect to the parameters and can be easily optimized by the gradient methods., Comment: 21 pages, 4 figures; Figures are fixed (V2)

In causal inference, we can consider a situation in which treatment on one unit affects others, i.e., interference exists. In the presence of interference, we cannot perform a classical randomization test directly because a null hypothesis is not sharp. Instead, we need to perform the randomization test restricted to a subset of units and assignments that makes the null hypothesis sharp. A previous study constructed a useful testing method, a biclique test, by reducing the selection of the appropriate subsets to searching for bicliques in a bipartite graph. However, since the power depends on the features of selected subsets, there is still room to improve the power by refining the selection procedure. In this paper, we propose a method to improve the biclique test based on a power evaluation of the randomization test. We explicitly derived an expression for the power of the randomization test under several assumptions and found that a certain quantity calculated from a given assignment set characterizes the power. Based on this fact, we propose a method to improve the power of the biclique test by modifying the selection rule for subsets of units and assignments. Through a simulation with a spatial interference setting, we confirm that the proposed method has higher power than the existing method., Comment: 24 pages, 5 figures

One of the main problems studied in statistics is the fitting of models. Ideally, we would like to explain a large dataset with as few parameters as possible. There have been numerous attempts at automatizing this process. Most notably, the Least Angle Regression algorithm, or LARS, is a computationally efficient algorithm that ranks the covariates of a linear model. The algorithm is further extended to a class of distributions in the generalized linear model by using properties of the manifold of exponential families as dually flat manifolds. However this extension assumes that the normalizing constant of the joint distribution of observations is easy to compute. This is often not the case, for example the normalizing constant may contain a complicated integral. We circumvent this issue if the normalizing constant satisfies a holonomic system, a system of linear partial differential equations with a finite-dimensional space of solutions. In this paper we present a modification of the holonomic gradient method and add it to the extended LARS algorithm. We call this the holonomic extended least angle regression algorithm, or HELARS. The algorithm was implemented using the statistical software R, and was tested with real and simulated datasets.

In this note, we claim that diagonal scaling of a sample covariance matrix is asymptotically inconsistent if the ratio of the dimension to the sample size converges to a positive constant, where population is assumed to be Gaussian with a spike covariance model. Our non-rigorous proof relies on the replica method developed in statistical physics. In contrast to similar results known in literature on principal component analysis, the strong inconsistency is not observed. Numerical experiments support the derived formulas., Comment: 22 pages, 13 figures

In this paper we implement the holonomic gradient method to exactly compute the normalising constant of Bingham distributions. This idea is originally applied for general Fisher-Bingham distributions in Nakayama et al. (2011). In this paper we explicitly apply this algorithm to show the exact calculation of the normalising constant; derive explicitly the Pfaffian system for this parametric case; implement the general approach for the maximum likelihood solution search and finally adjust the method for degenerate cases, namely when the parameter values have multiplicities.

The logistic regression model is known to converge to a Poisson point process model if the binary response tends to infinitely imbalanced. In this paper, it is shown that this phenomenon is universal in a wide class of link functions on binomial regression. The proof relies on the extreme value theory. For the logit, probit and complementary log-log link functions, the intensity measure of the point process becomes an exponential family. For some other link functions, deformed exponential families appear. A penalized maximum likelihood estimator for the Poisson point process model is suggested.

We study properties of Fisher distribution (von Mises-Fisher distribution, matrix Langevin distribution) on the rotation group SO(3). In particular we apply the holonomic gradient descent, introduced by Nakayama et al. (2011), and a method of series expansion for evaluating the normalizing constant of the distribution and for computing the maximum likelihood estimate. The rotation group can be identified with the Stiefel manifold of two orthonormal vectors. Therefore from the viewpoint of statistical modeling, it is of interest to compare Fisher distributions on these manifolds. We illustrate the difference with an example of near-earth objects data., Comment: 25 pages, 1 figures

In this paper we give a review of the method of imsets introduced by Studeny (2005) from a geometric point of view. Elementary imsets span a polyhedral cone and its dual cone is the cone of supermodular functions. We review basic facts on the structure of these cones. Then we derive some new results on the following topics: i) extreme rays of the cone of standardized supermodular functions, ii) faces of the cones, iii) small relations among elementary imsets, and iv) some computational results on Markov basis for the toric ideal defined by elementary imsets.

By a classical result of Gray, Neuhoff and Shields (1975) the $\bar\varrho$ distance between stationary processes is identified with an optimal stationary coupling problem of the corresponding stationary measures on the infinite product spaces. This is a modification of the optimal coupling problem from Monge--Kantorovich theory. In this paper we derive some general classes of examples of optimal stationary couplings which allow to calculate the $\bar\varrho$ distance in these cases in explicit form. We also extend the $\bar\varrho$ distance to random fields and to general nonmetric distance functions and give a construction method for optimal stationary $\bar c$-couplings. Our assumptions need in this case a geometric positive curvature condition., Comment: 21 pages

We study properties of semi-elementary imsets and elementary imsets introduced by Studeny (2005). The rules of the semi-graphoid axiom (decomposition, weak union and contraction) for conditional independence statements can be translated into a simple identity among three semi-elementary imsets. By recursively applying the identity, any semi-elementary imset can be written as a sum of elementary imsets, which we call a representation of the semi-elementary imset. A semi-elementary imset has many representations. We study properties of the set of possible representations of a semi-elementary imset and prove that all representations are connected by relations among four elementary imsets.

The structural gradient model is a multivariate statistical model in order to extract various interactions of given data set. In this note, we show that Efron's statistical curvature of the structural gradient model is less than that of a competitive mixture model under a null hypothesis., Comment: 14 pages

We give a new algorithm to find local maximum and minimum of a holonomic function and apply it for the Fisher-Bingham integral on the sphere $S^n$, which is used in the directional statistics. The method utilizes the theory and algorithms of holonomic systems., Comment: 23 pages, 1 figure

For statistical analysis of multiway contingency tables we propose modeling interaction terms in each maximal compact component of a hierarchical model. By this approach we can search for parsimonious models with smaller degrees of freedom than the usual hierarchical model, while preserving conditional independence structures in the hierarchical model. We discuss estimation and exacts tests of the proposed model and illustrate the advantage of the proposed modeling with some data sets., Comment: 26 pages

In the field of optimal transport theory, an optimal map is known to be a gradient map of a potential function satisfying cost-convexity. In this paper, the Jacobian determinant of a gradient map is shown to be log-concave with respect to a convex combination of the potential functions when the underlying manifold is the sphere and the cost function is the distance squared. The proof uses the non-negative cross-curvature property of the sphere recently established by Kim and McCann, and Figalli and Rifford. As an application to statistics, a new family of probability densities on the sphere is defined in terms of cost-convex functions. The log-concave property of the likelihood function follows from the inequality., Comment: 20 pages, 14 figures

We propose a flexible statistical model for high-dimensional quantitative data on a hypercube. Our model, called the structural gradient model (SGM), is based on a one-to-one map on the hypercube that is a solution for an optimal transport problem. As we show with many examples, SGM can describe various dependence structures including correlation and heteroscedasticity. The maximum likelihood estimation of SGM is effectively solved by the determinant-maximization programming. In particular, a lasso-type estimation is available by adding constraints. SGM is compared with graphical Gaussian models and mixture models., Comment: 28pages, 6figures

We propose a perturbation method for determining the (largest) group of invariance of a toric ideal defined in Aoki and Takemura [2008a]. In the perturbation method, we investigate how a generic element in the row space of the configuration defining a toric ideal is mapped by a permutation of the indeterminates. Compared to the proof in Aoki and Takemura [2008a] which was based on stabilizers of a subset of indeterminates, the perturbation method gives a much simpler proof of the group of invariance. In particular, we determine the group of invariance for a general hierarchical model of contingency tables in statistics, under the assumption that the numbers of the levels of the factors are generic. We prove that it is a wreath product indexed by a poset related to the intersection poset of the maximal interaction effects of the model., Comment: 17pages, no figures