papers

Publications (14)

q-bio.PE2025

Detection of evolutionary shifts in variance under an Ornsten-Uhlenbeck model

Wensha Zhang, Lam Si Tung Ho, Toby Kenney

Sudden changes in environmental conditions can lead to evolutionary shifts not only in the optimal trait value, but also in the diffusion variance under the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU)…

math.ST2019

Consistency of Ranking Estimators

Toby Kenney

The ranking problem is to order a collection of units by some unobserved parameter, based on observations from the associated distribution. This problem arises naturally in a numbe…

math.CT2022

Stone Duality for Topological Convexity Spaces

Toby Kenney

A convexity space is a set X with a chosen family of subsets (called convex subsets) that is closed under arbitrary intersections and directed unions. There is a lot of interest in…

stat.ME2019

Poisson PCA: Poisson Measurement Error corrected PCA, with Application to Microbiome Data

Toby Kenney, Tianshu Huang, Hong Gu

In this paper, we study the problem of computing a Principal Component Analysis of data affected by Poisson noise. We assume samples are drawn from independent Poisson distribution…

stat.ME2026

Hypergraph Variable Selection with False Discovery Rate Control

Sarah Organ, Toby Kenney, Hong Gu

Variable selection methods that control the false discovery rate often lose power when predictors exhibit complex dependence structures. We previously showed that selecting hierarc…

stat.ME2021

Deconvolution density estimation with penalised MLE

Yun Cai, Hong Gu, Toby Kenney

Deconvolution is the important problem of estimating the distribution of a quantity of interest from a sample with additive measurement error. Nearly all methods in the literature…

stat.ME2016

The Adequate Bootstrap

Toby Kenney, Hong Gu

There is a fundamental disconnect between what is tested in a model adequacy test, and what we would like to test. The usual approach is to test the null hypothesis "Model M is the…

stat.ME2019

SuRF: a New Method for Sparse Variable Selection, with Application in Microbiome Data Analysis

Lihui Liu, Hong Gu, Johan Van Limbergen +1

In this paper, we present a new variable selection method for regression and classification purposes. Our method, called Subsampling Ranking Forward selection (SuRF), is based on L…

stat.ME2016

Prior Distributions for Ranking Problems

Toby Kenney, Hao He, Hong Gu

The ranking problem is to order a collection of units by some unobserved parameter, based on observations from the associated distribution. This problem arises naturally in a numbe…

stat.ME2020

Stochastic Generalized Lotka-Volterra Model with An Application to Learning Microbial Community Structures

Libai Xu, Ximing Xu, Dehan Kong +2

Inferring microbial community structure based on temporal metagenomics data is an important goal in microbiome studies. The deterministic generalized Lotka-Volterra differential (G…

stat.AP2026

Factor State Space Modelling of the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck Process with Measurement Error and its Application

Shanglun Li, Toby Kenney, Hong Gu

Standard Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) models often yield biased parameter estimates when measurement error is ignored. While the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck State Space Model (OUSSM) addresses t…

stat.AP2022

Rank Selection for Non-negative Matrix Factorization

Yun Cai, Hong Gu, Toby Kenney

Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) is a widely used dimension reduction method that factorizes a non-negative data matrix into two lower dimensional non-negative matrices: One…

q-bio.PE2022

Evolutionary shift detection with ensemble variable selection

Wensha Zhang, Toby Kenney, Lam Si Tung Ho

1. Abrupt environmental changes can lead to evolutionary shifts in trait evolution. Identifying these shifts is an important step in understanding the evolutionary history of pheno…

stat.ME2026

Setwise Hierarchical Variable Selection and the Generalized Linear Step-Up Procedure for False Discovery Rate Control

Sarah Organ, Toby Kenney, Hong Gu

Controlling the false discovery rate (FDR) in variable selection becomes challenging when predictors are correlated, as existing methods often exclude all members of correlated gro…