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Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_5
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
The authors present a new method for robust principal
component regression for non-Gaussian data. First, they show that
principal component regression outperforms classical linear regression
when the dimensionality and the sample size are allowed to increase by
being insensitive to collinearity and exploiting low rank structure.
They demonstrate their theoretical calculations by sweeping parameters
and show that mean square error follows theory. Then the authors
develop a new method for doing principal component regression by
assuming the random vector and noise are elliptically distributed, a
more general assumption than the standard Gaussian assumption. They
demonstrate that this more general method outperforms traditional
principal component regression on different elliptical distributions
(multivariate-t, EC1, EC2), and show that it achieves similar
performance for Gaussian distributions. Finally, they compare
performance on real finance data and demonstrate that their new method
outperforms the standard principal component regression and the
standard lasso (linear regression) technique.
This paper is very
high quality. The introduction presents a clear explanation of related
work and goes on to explain the significant contributions made by this
work. The sections are logically organized, and the math is explained
well. The figures support the arguments put forth by the authors. The
authors new principal component method outperforms standard principal
component method on both generated data and real world data.
The authors could clarify how they implemented lasso regression
when performing the simulation study and when analyzing equity data.
How was the number of selected features chosen from the lasso method?
Was the threshold varied up and down to change the sparsity pattern or
was the lasso trade-off parameter varied? After the features were
chosen was the solution polished? That is, the sparsity pattern can be
determined from using lasso regression, but then the regression can be
re-run (polished) with the fixed sparsity pattern without the
additional $l_1$ cost function.
Finally, when looking at
equity data. The authors chose a subset of all stock data. Were other
categories tested or was there a particular reason why the authors
focused on this category? Their results would be even stronger if they
demonstrated improved performance in multiple
sectors. Q2: Please summarize your review in 1-2
sentences
The authors present a high quality, thorough paper on
a new method for robust principal component regression. The authors
could clarify a few minor points, but the paper is overall solid work.
Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_7
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
The authors propose a robust and sparse principal
component regression (PCR) estimator for non-Gaussian data. This is
motivated by theoretical arguments on when classical PCR is justified over
least squares regression (when a low-rank structure is present) and by
data / noise with heavy and dependent tails. Finally, the approach is
demonstrated successfully on simulated and experimental equity data.
The writing is very clear. There are two significant
contributions: 1. The authors show the when PCR is preferable to
standard least squares regression (collinearity invariance, exploitation
of low-rank structure in the design / sample covariance matrix). This is
illustrated promptly with a few simple and intuitive synthetic
experiments. 2. Large-d-small-n cases are handled by a robust PCR
variant under an elliptical family of densities model, that specialize in
capturing heavy and dependent tails in the data.
The simplicity of
the proposed algorithm is salient: - Project data on the sparse
principal eigenvector of the sample Kendall's tau (akin to sparse PCA on
the sample covariance, via the truncated power algorithm). - Regress Y
on Xu.
Other notes: - line 373, F distribution ->
exponential distribution - why do you scale the prediction error by
100 times instead of scaling the error axis? I might have misunderstood
here. Q2: Please summarize your review in 1-2
sentences
After rigorously showing clear advantages of PCR vs
least squares, the paper presents a novel semiparametric approach on
sparse and robust PCR.
I've read the author's
rebuttal. Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_8
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
Response to author feedback: Thank you for
clarifying the novelty of the robust PCA approached; it is a good idea to
also describe the novelty saliently in the paper. I suggest also
explicitly mentioning the possibility of the generalization to the case
with more than one PCA component, even if the full proof would not fit in
this paper. Simply saying in the Introduction that you consider here the
special case of one component, since it is already an interesting case
backed up with positive empirical experiments, would already help a lot.
Summary:
The paper generalizes principal component
regression (PCR) by providing a robust variant of the technique based
on multivariate Kendall's tau in place of the covariance matrix. The
authors then provide a simple algorithm for learning the model and,
more importantly, analyze its theoretical properties, providing the rate
of convergence. Finally, the model is demonstrated on simulated and
equity data.
Quality:
The method presented in the paper is
fairly straightforward, consisting merely of estimating the population
Kendall's tau, computing its first eigenvector, and then performing
linear regression to the observations. The method is very intuitive;
it is easy to understand why this should be preferred to classical
PCR when working with data that has outliers.
The use of Kendall's
tau in place of the covariance matrix in PCA is a nice idea and also
well justified based on Oja's theorem. However, it remains unclear
whether this should be considered as a novel contribution of the
paper; no citations for earlier works are given, but the authors do
not seem to describe it as a key contribution of the paper either. I
believe it has potential for wider impact than the particular
example considered in this paper, and one could imagine already a
paper studying such a robust PCA estimator as a valuable contribution.
To my knowledge, the closest work here would be the very recent paper
by Han and Liu in ICML'13. Can the authors clarify the relationship
with that paper?
The analysis of the theoretical properties of PCR
is valuable. However, the whole discussion is limited to the
special case of simple PCR where the outcome is assumed to be
related only to the first principal component. Do any of the
results generalize to the more general case where the outcome is
related to the first K components? At least the authors should
explicitly mention that they limit the theoretical analysis to this
special case; now the paper never even mentions the PCR setup I would
consider as the standard one.
The experiments seem to be conducted
properly and they clearly illustrate the advantage of the robust
variant; such a set is sufficient for a theoretical paper. I like the
fact that the authors show how the equity data is not normally
distributed, motivating the example.
Clarity:
The
paper is reasonably well written, to the degree that a theory-heavy
paper can be. However, the exact scope and contributions are a bit
vague; it is unclear whether the use of Kendall's tau for robust PCA
is novel, the authors do not mention they limit the analysis to a
special case of PCR, and some of the earlier results are listed as
"well known" without citations.
One problem is that the proofs
for the perhaps main contributions of the paper, Theorems 3.2 and 3.3,
are left for Supplementary material, without even mentioning it in the
paper itself. It is understandable that writing out the full
proofs would take too much space here, but some sort of an outline
would be useful.
Originality:
The paper has two novelties:
it presents a novel robust PCR technique and it provides new
theoretical analysis of PCR in general. The significance of the first
relies fully on whether the use of Kendall's tau in PCA should be
considered as a novel contribution; if not, the algorithm for robust
PCR is trivial.
The theoretical analysis provides new useful
results and is based on very recent works by Oja, Vu and Lei, and
Ravikumar et al.
Significance:
The robust method is
clearly useful for anyone applying PCR, especially in light of the
theoretical analysis for the convergence rate. However, the
significance may be limited due to the fact that both the theoretical
analysis and the simulation experiment rely on the simple model where
the output only depends on the first principal component. The
application to the equity data suggests the method works well in
practice, but is merely one example.
Detailed comments:
- The 2nd sentence of Abstract is very complex and tries to lay
out all the dimensions of the paper at once. You should consider
splitting it into at least two sentences.
- Page 3: "As a
well-known result..." would need a citation. In general, "well known"
is not good use of scientific language; you use it twice in the same
paragraph for results that are not obvious for most readers.
-
Section 3.1: It is good to remind the readers about the elliptical
distribution, but listing all the equivalent formulations is not be
necessary when the rest of the analysis only uses one of them.
Q2: Please summarize your review in 1-2
sentences
The paper presents a new method for robust principal
component regression and proves interesting theoretical results for
PCR in general. The main shortcoming is limiting the analysis to the
simplest case of PCR with only one principal
component. Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_9
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
Summary:
The paper is primarily divided into
two parts. The authors first discuss the advantages of principal component
regression (PCR) over classical linear regression. After giving an
overview of the problem, they provide new theoretical results explicitly
showing how principal component regression is insensitive to collinearity,
and how it can take advantage of low rank structure in the covariance
matrix. These results are taken in the setting where both dimension d and
sample size n can increase. The second part of the paper develops a new
PCR algorithm to handle the case where d > n, and when the predictors X
are from an elliptical distribution. The new method is straightforward:
the use of Kendall's tau in place of the sample covariance matrix handles
the generalization to elliptical distributions (utilizing recent work by
Oja), while the sparsity constraint handles the setting where d > n.
The authors then confirm the advantages of the new method in both
simulated and real-world data.
Quality:
The primary
theoretical results (theorem 2.2 and 3.3) are strong contributions and
technically sound. The simulated and experimental results, seen in figures
1, 2 and 3, add significantly to the paper's strength.
One primary
quibble is the assumption of the principal component model (equation 2.1)
in the first part of the paper, and the assumption of equation 3.5 in the
second part. Discussions from Artemiou and Li (2009) and Cook (2007) --
both referenced in this paper -- focus on the advantages of PCR over
linear regression in a much more general context. In the current paper,
the regression coefficient is explicitly assumed to be aligned with the
first principal component, which (based on the aforementioned references)
does not characterize all scenarios where PCR outperforms LR. It is thus
unclear to what extent the results in figure 1 and 2 are trivial -- is PCR
outperforming LR merely because a principal component model was assumed?
The application to real-world data is a strong point of the paper,
and the positive result seen in figure 3 helps address the above concern.
However, the dataset they chose is one example, and it is unclear whether
the strength of RPCR depends on analysis choices, such as the authors'
choice to focus on the financial subcategory in their dataset.
Clarity:
The paper is well-written. The organization
structure is exceptional, making the paper easy to read. The presentations
of the main theorems (2.2 and 3.3) are less clear, understandably due to
the fact that their proofs are delegated to the supplementary materials.
Some choices, such as the supposition in theorem 2.2 (r*(Sigma)logd/n =
o(1)), or the conditions of theorem 3.2/3.3, are not made clear or are not
self-evident. Some exposition of the theorems themselves -- and not just
their consequences -- would be helpful.
Originality:
The
originality of the paper is largely tied to the two main theoretical
contributions, theorem 2.2 and theorem 3.3. The development of the RPCR
algorithm builds heavily from recent results; however, the synthesis of
these results into a novel algorithm contributes to the overall
originality of the paper.
Significance:
The two main
theorems are significant contributions to the field. As the authors
mentioned, theorem 2.2 is the first time observations in PCR have been
explicitly characterized. The new method, RPCR, also shows promise to be
used by others.
Other notes: - Line 43: R^{nxd} should be
R^{dxd} - Line 358: The first w_d should be w_3 - Line 361: I
could not find a definition for m, but I assume m = 2 in this context.
- There is limited discussion of the constant alpha. For example, LR
outperforms PCR for large alpha. Secondly, was there a reason, aside from
simplicity, to set alpha = 1 in the simulation studies?
Q2: Please summarize your review in 1-2
sentences
This paper signifies important contributions to our
understanding of principal component regression, and is well-presented.
Results would be strengthened by a clearer justification of the choice to
assume a principal component model, and by a more thorough analysis of
real-world datasets.
Q1:Author
rebuttal: Please respond to any concerns raised in the reviews. There are
no constraints on how you want to argue your case, except for the fact
that your text should be limited to a maximum of 6000 characters. Note
however that reviewers and area chairs are very busy and may not read long
vague rebuttals. It is in your own interest to be concise and to the
point.
With regard to model generalization, we would like to
point out that the current proof techniques, with proper modifications,
can be generalized to the settings where there are more than one principal
component in the regression model (the rate of convergence shown in
Theorem 3.3 will be changed to \sqrt{ks \log(kd)/n}, where k is the number
of principal components in the model). In the mean time, as pointed out by
other reviewers, Theorem 2.2 has been very helpful in illustrating some
advantages of PCR over least square regression.
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