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Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin | School of Business and Economics | Statistics | News | Paper "Inference for L2-Boosting" by Rügamer and Greven appeared in Statistics and Computing 30(2)

Paper "Inference for L2-Boosting" by Rügamer and Greven appeared in Statistics and Computing 30(2)



The paper Inference for L2-Boosting by D. Rügamer and S. Greven, has been appeared in
Statistics and Computing 30(2), pp. 279289.

Abstract

We propose a statistical inference framework for the component-wise functional gradient descent algorithm (CFGD) under normality assumption for model errors, also known as L2-Boosting. The CFGD is one of the most versatile tools to analyze data, because it scales well to high-dimensional data sets, allows for a very flexible definition of additive regression models and incorporates inbuilt variable selection. Due to the variable selection, we build on recent proposals for post-selection inference. However, the iterative nature of component-wise boosting, which can repeatedly select the same component to update, necessitates adaptations and extensions to existing approaches. We propose tests and confidence intervals for linear, grouped and penalized additive model components selected by L2-Boosting. Our concepts also transfer to slow-learning algorithms more generally, and to other selection techniques which restrict the response space to more complex sets than polyhedra. We apply our framework to an additive model for sales prices of residential apartments and investigate the properties of our concepts in simulation studies.