A nonparametric regression model with tree-structured response

Yuan Wang, J. S. Marron, Burcu Aydin, Alim Ladha, Elizabeth Bullitt, Haonan Wang

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

10 Scopus citations

Abstract

Developments in science and technology over the last two decades has motivated the study of complex data objects. In this article, we consider the topological properties of a population of tree-structured objects. Our interest centers on modeling the relationship between a tree-structured response and other covariates. For tree-structured objects, this poses serious challenges since most regression methods rely on linear operations in Euclidean space. We generalize the notion of nonparametric regression to the case of a tree-structured response variable. In addition, we develop a fast algorithm and give its theoretical justification. We implement the proposed method to analyze a dataset of human brain artery trees. An important lesson is that smoothing in the full tree space can reveal much deeper scientific insights than the simple smoothing of summary statistics. This article has supplementary materials online.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)1272-1285
Number of pages14
JournalJournal of the American Statistical Association
Volume107
Issue number500
DOIs
StatePublished - 2012

Keywords

  • Binary tree
  • Data object
  • Object-oriented data
  • Smoothing

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Statistics and Probability
  • Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty

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