Semiparametric efficiency bounds for high-dimensional models

The Annals of Statistics · 2018 · Volume 46 · Issue 5

Abstract

Asymptotic lower bounds for estimation play a fundamental role in assessing the quality of statistical procedures. In this paper, we propose a framework for obtaining semiparametric efficiency bounds for sparse high-dimensional models, where the dimension of the parameter is larger than the sample size. We adopt a semiparametric point of view: we concentrate on one-dimensional functions of a high-dimensional parameter. We follow two different approaches to reach the lower bounds: asymptotic Cramér–Rao bounds and Le Cam’s type of analysis. Both of these approaches allow us to define a class of asymptotically unbiased or “regular” estimators for which a lower bound is derived. Consequently, we show that certain estimators obtained by de-sparsifying (or de-biasing) an $\ell_{1}$-penalized M-estimator are asymptotically unbiased and achieve the lower bound on the variance: thus in this sense they are asymptotically efficient. The paper discusses in detail the linear regression model and the Gaussian graphical model.

Keywords

62F12, 62J07, Asymptotic efficiency, Cramér–Rao bound, graphical models, high-dimensional, Lasso, Le Cam’s lemma, Linear regression, Sparsity

Enable JavaScript for citation tools and additional paper interactions.