Exactness of penalization for exact minimax penalty function method in nonconvex programming

The exact minimax penalty function method is used to solve a noncon- vex differentiable optimization problem with both inequality and equality constraints. The conditions for exactness of the penalization for the exact minimax penalty function method are established by assuming that the functions constituting the considered con- strained optimization problem are invex with respect to the same function η （with the exception of those equality constraints for which the associated Lagrange multipliers are negative these functions should be assumed to be incave with respect to η）. Thus, a threshold of the penalty parameter is given such that, for all penalty parameters exceeding this threshold, equivalence holds between the set of optimal solutions in the considered constrained optimization problem and the set of minimizer in its associated penalized problem with an exact minimax penalty function. It is shown that coercivity is not suf- ficient to prove the results.

Regularized Inverse Covariance Estimation for Longitudinal Data with Informative Dropout

This paper proposes a novel method for estimating the sparse inverse covariance matrixfor longitudinal data with informative dropouts. Based on the modified Cholesky decomposition,the sparse inverse covariance matrix is modelled by the autoregressive regression model,which guarantees the positive definiteness of the covariance matrix. To account for the informativedropouts, we then propose a penalized estimating equation method using the inverse probabilityweighting approach. The informative dropout propensity parameters are estimated by the generalizedmethod of moments. The asymptotic properties are investigated for the resulting estimators.Finally, we illustrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method through Monte Carlosimulations and a practical application.

Shrinkage estimation analysis of correlated binary data with a diverging number of parameters

For analyzing correlated binary data with high-dimensional covariates,we,in this paper,propose a two-stage shrinkage approach.First,we construct a weighted least-squares(WLS) type function using a special weighting scheme on the non-conservative vector field of the generalized estimating equations(GEE) model.Second,we define a penalized WLS in the spirit of the adaptive LASSO for simultaneous variable selection and parameter estimation.The proposed procedure enjoys the oracle properties in high-dimensional framework where the number of parameters grows to infinity with the number of clusters.Moreover,we prove the consistency of the sandwich formula of the covariance matrix even when the working correlation matrix is misspecified.For the selection of tuning parameter,we develop a consistent penalized quadratic form(PQF) function criterion.The performance of the proposed method is assessed through a comparison with the existing methods and through an application to a crossover trial in a pain relief study.