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Asymptotics of coverages of HD confidence sets and recentering at shrinkage estimates: phase transitions, large deviations

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  • Stein Estimation and Statistical Shrinkage Methods
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Abstract

In this article, we consider confidence set estimation of the mean vector of a p-dimensional normal distribution, based on n iid observations from it, with the covariance matrix \(\Sigma \) assumed positive definite but completely unknown. We consider two regimes, p fixed and p growing with n. The coverage properties as well as the expected volume and the girth of the classic Hotelling confidence set and Bayesian HPD sets under normal priors are worked out in a series of theorems. Of specific interest are theorems on the existence of an explicit phase transition in the coverage probability of the Hotelling confidence set and subexponential bounds on the noncoverage probability of HPD sets when the mean vector is sparse in \(\mathcal {L}_0\) and \(\mathcal {L}_1\) norms. The results are illustrated with discussions and two sets of computations.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are thankful to the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and corrections.

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Correspondence to Anirban DasGupta.

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This work is partially supported by ELS-90014395 grant at Purdue University.

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DasGupta, A. Asymptotics of coverages of HD confidence sets and recentering at shrinkage estimates: phase transitions, large deviations. Jpn J Stat Data Sci (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42081-023-00236-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42081-023-00236-9

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