Statistical Tests: Asymptotic, Exact, ou based on Simulations?

This morning, in our mathematical statistics course, we’ve been discussing the ‘proportion test‘, i.e. given a sample of Bernoulli trials, with , we want to test

against 

A natural test (which can be related to the maximum likelihood ratio test) is  based on the statistic

The test function is here

To get the bounds of the acceptance region, we need the distribution of , under . Consider here a numerical application

n=20
p=.5
set.seed(1)
echantillon=sample(0:1,size=n,
            prob=c(1-p,p),
            replace=TRUE)
  • the asymptotic distribution

The first (and standard idea) is to use the central limit theorem, since

So, under ,

Then  while . The acceptance region is then between the two red lines, below,

T=sqrt(n)*(mean(echantillon)-.5)/
  sqrt(mean(echantillon)*
  (1-mean(echantillon)))
u=seq(-3,3,by=.01)
v=dnorm(u)
plot(u,v,type="l",lwd=2)
abline(v=qnorm(.025),col="red")
abline(v=qnorm(.975),col="red")
abline(v=T,col="blue")

  • the exact distribution

Here we use the fact that

Using transformation of the ‘density’, we can (at least numerically) compute the (exact) distribution of

 

u=seq(-3,3,by=.01)
v=sqrt(.5*(1-.5))*n*dbinom(round(
  (sqrt(.5*(1-.5))*u/sqrt(n)+.5)*n),
  size=n,prob=.5)/sqrt(n)

Here I used a round value, it guess it would be better with a floor function, but here the graph looks symmetric (which is something I like)

abline(v=sqrt(n)*(qbinom(.025,size=n,prob=.5)/n-.5)/sqrt(.5*(1-.5)),col="red")
abline(v=sqrt(n)*(qbinom(.975,size=n,prob=.5)/n-.5)/sqrt(.5*(1-.5)),col="red")
lines(u,v,type="s")

  • distribution based on Monte Carlo simulations

Probably more interesting, here we do not use the fact that we might know the distribution of the mean. We just generate random samples, under , and then compute ,

T=rep(NA,1000)
for(i in 1:1000){
x=sample(0:1,size=n,
         prob=c(1-.5,.5),
         replace=TRUE)
m=mean(x)
T[i]=(m-.5)/sqrt(m*(1-m))*sqrt(n)}
lines(density(T),lwd=2)
abline(v=quantile(T,.025),col="red")
abline(v=quantile(T,.975),col="red")

Where does that 2 come from in the likelihood ratio test?

This afternoon, in class, we’ve seen Wald test, the likelihood-ratio test, and finally the score test. All of them rely on the same idea

and then, use that if   with , we can write

Or – slightly more interesting – if  , then

Then one can get that

Based on that property, we can derive Wald statistics,

that can be visualized below

The score test is a test on the square of the slope

The idea for the likelihood ratio test is to consider

Observe that  can be written, using Taylor’s expansion

for some . The first term is null, since the maximum likelihood estimator is precisely at the maximum of the (log) likelihood. So

That’s more or less where the 2 comes from. Then observe that

and therefore

This test will be discussed further next week (since it is related to Neyman-Pearson’s theorem), but also, that result can be used to derive confidence intervals. With a log-likelihood as follows

it is possible to get a confidence interval for the parameter by looking for‘s such that

We will discuss that idea later on, in the context of profile likelihood.

Tests, Power and Significance

In the mathematical statistics course today, we started talking about tests, and decision rules. To illustrate all the concepts introduced today, we considered the case where we have a sample  with . And we want to test

  against 

In the course, we’ve seen that we could use a test based on the order statistics .  The test would be

i.e. if  we choose , and if , we choose .

From the definition of the first order risk,

we can easily get that

Thus, the power is then

To visualize it, use the following parameters

n=5
alpha=.1
theta0=1

Then

C1=theta0*(1-alpha)^(1/n)
theta=seq(0,2,by=.01)
P1=(1-(theta0/theta)^n*(1-alpha))*(theta>C1)
plot(theta,P1,type="l",lwd=2,col="blue",xlab="",ylab="Power")

Note that, so far, we did never consider the maximum of our sample. Assume that the maximum is , then we can compute the -value,

Here it is

PV=(1-theta^n)*(theta<=1)
plot(theta,PV,type="l",lwd=2,col="blue",xlab="",ylab="p-value")

Now, why not consider another test, based on the minimum (since we have the distribution of the minimum of a sample from a uniform distribution). The test is the same as before

but here, the threshold is

The power of the test is here

This test has the same significance level (by construction), but the power of the test is clearly lower than the one we got using the maximum of our sample, when 

C2=theta0*(1-alpha^(1/n))
P2=(1-(theta0/theta)*(1-alpha^(1/n)))^n*(theta>C2)
lines(theta,P2,type="l",lwd=2,col="red")

Why not consider a test based on ? The problem is that we need the distribution (more specifically the survival distribution) of . We can compute it, numerically. But that might be painful. An alternative is to consider some approximation, based on the central limit theorem, i.e.

Our test is based on , and to get the same significance as before, use

The power of the test is then

Here it is

mu=2*(theta0/2)
s2=2^2*(theta0^2/12)/n
C3=qnorm(1-alpha,mu,sqrt(s2))
(P=1-pnorm(C3,theta,sqrt(s2)))*(theta>C3)
lines(theta,P)

Observe here that the test based on the maximum is not more powerful than the one based on the average (I just wonder if it could be due to the Gaussian approximation…).

Visualising a Circular Density

This afternoon, Jean-Luc asked me some help about an old post I did publish, minuit, l’heure du crime; and some graphs published a few days after, where I used a different visualisation, in another post.

The idea is that the hour can be seen as circular, in the sense that 23:58 is actually very close to 00:03. So when we use a nonparametric kernel estimator of time events, we have to take into account that property. More specifically, consider the density of an angle, i.e. a function f(\cdot) such that \int_0^{2\pi}f(\omega)d\omega=1
with a circular relationship, in the sense that f(\omega+2\pi)=f(\omega).

In the dataset sent by Jean-Luc, we have some thefts in a big city, in France. The dataset is a simple spreadsheet with one columns, with ’00:20′ or ’17:45′ inside. Those are more or less reported time of thefts, as declared to the police.

B=read.table("Temp_Heures_VV.csv",header=TRUE,
  sep=";")
HM=as.character(B[,1])
H=substr(HM,1,(nchar(HM)-3))
M=substr(HM,(nchar(HM)-1),(nchar(HM)))
X=as.numeric(H)+as.numeric(M)/60

The time is a number from 0 to 24.

U=seq(0,1,by=1/250)
O=U*2*pi
U12=seq(0,1,by=1/24)
O12=U12*2*pi
OM=2*pi*X/24
XL=c(X-24,X,X+24)
d=density(X)
d=density(XL,bw=d$bw,n=1500)
I=which((d$x>=6)&(d$x<=30))
Od=d$x[I]/24*2*3.141592-3.141592/2
Dd=d$y[I]/max(d$y)+1

The idea to get a nice density estimation is to use a simple mirror technique : we have three versions of the data, one for today, one for yesterday, and one for tomorrow. Of course, we have to use a shorter bandwidth.

R=1/24/max(d$y)/3+1 
plot(cos(O),-sin(O),xlim=c(-2,2),ylim=c(-2,2),
     type="l",axes=FALSE,xlab="",ylab="")
for(i in 3.14159/12*(0:12)){ 
  segments(-cos(i),-sin(i),cos(i),sin(i),col="grey")} 
segments(.9*cos(O12),.9*sin(O12),
         1.1*cos(O12),1.1*sin(O12))
text(.7,0,"6")
text(-.7,0,"18")
text(0,-.7,"12")
text(0,.7,"24")
R=1/24/max(d$y)/3+1
lines(R*cos(O),R*sin(O),lty=2)
AX=R*cos(Od);AY=-R*sin(Od)
BX=Dd*cos(Od);BY=-Dd*sin(Od)
COUL=rep("blue",length(AX))
COUL[R<Dd]="red"
CM=cm.colors(200)
a=trunc(100*Dd/R)
COUL=CM[a]
segments(AX,AY,BX,BY,col=COUL,lwd=2)
lines(Dd*cos(Od),-Dd*sin(Od),lwd=2)

The dotted line would be a uniform distribution over the day. The true distribution is the black bold line. The area in purple is when we have more crimes, and the blue line is when we have less crimes. The blue area is equal to the purple one. There is a clear symmetry in the evening around midnight (but not during the day : 6 am is not the same as 6 pm). This graph is the circular visualisation of the kernel density estimator, the same way the rose diagram is the circular visualisation of the histogram.

Calcul(s) d’information de Fisher

La semaine passée, on avait fait quelques calculs pour obtenir l’information de Fisher pour des lois classiques. Je voulais juste remettre au propre les calculs pour les lois à plusieurs paramètres. Pour la loi Gamma,

la log-vraisemblance s’écrit

de telle sorte que

Ici, même pas besoin de prendre une espérance car la Hessienne est constante

Continue reading Calcul(s) d’information de Fisher

Mutualisation et Segmentation en Assurance

L’article Segmentation et Mutualisation, les deux faces d’une même pièce, coécrit avec Michel Denuit et Romuald Elie paraîtra dans les jours à venir, dans un numéro autour du big data en assurance, avec des articles de Patrick Thourot, sur la tarification du pay as you drive, de Lucie Taleyson, sur la tarification dans les assurances collectives, et tout plein d’articles passionnants, signés François-Xavier Hay ou encore Arnaud Chaput.

L’article (disponible en pdf) présente l’impact de la segmentation dans un environnement concurrentiel. Il d’un exemple simple, pour ne pas dire simpliste. Il sera perfectionné avec le pricing game organisé mi novembre. A suivre donc…