Open Access
December 2019 Quantile regression under memory constraint
Xi Chen, Weidong Liu, Yichen Zhang
Ann. Statist. 47(6): 3244-3273 (December 2019). DOI: 10.1214/18-AOS1777

Abstract

This paper studies the inference problem in quantile regression (QR) for a large sample size $n$ but under a limited memory constraint, where the memory can only store a small batch of data of size $m$. A natural method is the naive divide-and-conquer approach, which splits data into batches of size $m$, computes the local QR estimator for each batch and then aggregates the estimators via averaging. However, this method only works when $n=o(m^{2})$ and is computationally expensive. This paper proposes a computationally efficient method, which only requires an initial QR estimator on a small batch of data and then successively refines the estimator via multiple rounds of aggregations. Theoretically, as long as $n$ grows polynomially in $m$, we establish the asymptotic normality for the obtained estimator and show that our estimator with only a few rounds of aggregations achieves the same efficiency as the QR estimator computed on all the data. Moreover, our result allows the case that the dimensionality $p$ goes to infinity. The proposed method can also be applied to address the QR problem under distributed computing environment (e.g., in a large-scale sensor network) or for real-time streaming data.

Citation

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Xi Chen. Weidong Liu. Yichen Zhang. "Quantile regression under memory constraint." Ann. Statist. 47 (6) 3244 - 3273, December 2019. https://doi.org/10.1214/18-AOS1777

Information

Received: 1 October 2017; Revised: 1 October 2018; Published: December 2019
First available in Project Euclid: 31 October 2019

Digital Object Identifier: 10.1214/18-AOS1777

Subjects:
Primary: 62F12
Secondary: 62J02

Keywords: distributed inference , divide-and-conquer , Quantile regression , Sample quantile , streaming data

Rights: Copyright © 2019 Institute of Mathematical Statistics

Vol.47 • No. 6 • December 2019
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