On Efficient Designing of Nonlinear Experiments
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Statistica Sinica 5(1995), 421-440 ON EFFICIENT DESIGNING OF NONLINEAR EXPERIMENTS Probal Chaudhuri and Per A. Mykland Indian Statistical Institute and University of Chicago Abstract: Adaptive designs that optimize the Fisher information asso ciated with a nonlinear exp erimentare considered. Asymptotic prop erties of the maximum like- liho o d estimate and related statistical inference based on dep endent data generated by sequentially designed adaptive nonlinear exp eriments are explored. Conditions on the exp erimental designs that ensure rst order eciency of the maximum likeliho o d estimate when the parametrization of the nonlinear mo del is suciently smo oth and regular are derived. A few interesting op en questions that arise naturally in course of the investigation are mentioned and brie y discussed. Key words and phrases: Adaptive sequential designs, rst order eciency, Fisher information, lo cal -optimality, martingales, maximum likeliho o d, nonlinear mo dels. 1. Intro duction: Adaptive Sequential Design of Nonlinear Exp eri- ments In a typical nonlinear set up involving a resp onse Y and a regressor X , the de- p endence of the resp onse on the regressor is mo deled using a family of probability distributions, whichinvolve an unknown Euclidean parameter (to be estimated from the data) in such a way that the parametrization is smo oth and regular, and the asso ciated Fisher information happ ens to b e a nonlinear function of that parameter of interest. Standard examples of such nonlinear mo dels include the usual nonlinear regression mo dels (see e.g. Gallant (1987), Bates and Watts (1988), Seb er and Wild (1989)), various generalized linear mo dels (see e.g. Mc- Cullagh and Nelder (1989)), and many p opular heteroscedastic regression mo dels (see e.g. Box and Hill (1974), Bickel (1978), Jobson and Fuller (1980), Carroll and Rupp ert (1988)). An awkward situation arises when one needs to design an exp eriment in order to ensure maximum eciency of parameter estimates in such a nonlinear problem. Since the Fisher information asso ciated with any such problem dep ends on the unknown parameter in a nonlinear way, an ecient designing of the exp eriment to guarantee optimal p erformance of the nonlinear least squares or the maximum likeliho o d estimate will require knowledge of that unknown parameter! (See Co chran (1973, pp: 771-772), Bates and Watts (1988, 422 PROBAL CHAUDHURI AND PER A. MYKLAND p: 129) for various interesting remarks in connection with this). An extensive discussion on p ossible resolutions of this problem together with several examples of nonlinear exp eriments can be found in Ford, Titterington and Kitsos (1989), Myers, Khuri and Carter (1989) and Chaudhuri and Mykland (1993). A few more interesting examples are discussed b elow. Example 1.1. Treloar (1974) investigated an enzymatic reaction in whichthe number of counts per minute of a radioactive pro duct from the reaction was measured, and from these counts the initial velo city (Y ) of the reaction was calculated. This velo city is related to the substrate concentration (X )chosen by the exp erimenter through the nonlinear regression equation (Michaelis-Menten 1 mo del) Y = X ( + X ) + e. Here = ( ; ) is the unknown parameter 0 1 0 1 of interest, and e is the random noise with zero mean as usual. The exp eriment was conducted once with the enzyme (Galactosyltransferase of Golgi Membranes) treated with Puromycin and once with the enzyme untreated. The main ob jective of the study was to investigate the e ect of the intro duction of Puromycin on the ultimate velo city parameter and the half velo city parameter . 0 1 Example 1.2. Cox and Snell (1989, pp: 10-11) while discussing binary resp onse regression mo dels mentioned ab out an industrial exp eriment, where the number of ingots that were not ready for rolling were counted out of a xed number of ingots tested. The number counted dep ends on twocovariates, which are heating time and soaking time determined by the exp erimenter at the time of pro cessing. This leads to a binomial regression mo del and the main interest is in getting insights into how variations in heating and soaking times in uence the number of ingots that turn out to b e not ready for rolling. Example 1.3. Powsner (1935) collected data from an exp eriment that was conducted to determine the e ect of exp erimental temp erature on the develop- mental stages (i.e. embryonic, egg-larval, larval and pupal stages) of the fruit y Drosophila Melanogaster. McCullagh and Nelder (1989) discussed the data and demonstrated how it can be analyzed using appropriate gamma regression mo dels with the exp erimental temp erature as the covariate. Chaudhuri and Mykland (1993) investigated an adaptive sequential scheme for designing nonlinear exp eriments and established asymptotic D-optimalityof 1=2 the design as well as n -consistency, asymptotic normalityand rst order e- ciency of the maximum likeliho o d estimate based on observations generated by their prop osed scheme in a nonlinear set up satisfying suitable regularity condi- tions. Adaptive sequential and batch sequential designs for certain very sp eci c typ es of nonlinear exp eriments related to some sp ecial mo dels were explored ear- DESIGNING NONLINEAR EXPERIMENTS 423 lier byBox and Hunter (1965), Ford and Silvey (1980), Ab delbasit and Plackett (1983), Ford, Titterington and Wu (1985), Wu (1985), Minkin (1987) and Mc- Cormick, Mallik and Reeves (1988) among others. Some of these authors made attempts to study the asymptotic behavior of their resp ective design schemes and resulting parameter estimates. The key idea lying at the ro ot of such design strategies is to divide available resources into several groups and to split the entire exp eriment into a number of steps. At each step, the exp eriment is conducted using only a single p ortion of divided resources. At the end of each step, an analysis is carried out and parameter estimates are up dated using the available data. The results emerging from this data analysis are used in ecient design- ing of the exp eriment at subsequent steps. As pointed out by several authors (see e.g. Cherno (1975), Fedorov (1972), Silvey (1980)), the most attractive feature of adaptive sequential exp eriments is their ability to optimally utilize the dynamics of the learning pro cess asso ciated with exp erimentation, data analysis and inference. At the b eginning, the scientist do es not have much information, and hence an initial exp eriment is b ound to be somewhat tentative in nature. As the exp erimentcontinues and more and more observations are obtained, the scientist is able to form a more precise impression of the underlying theory,and this more de nite p erception is used to design a more informative exp erimentin the future that is exp ected to give rise to more relevant and useful data. The main purp ose of this article is to explore some fundamental theoretical issues that are of critical imp ortance in studying the asymptotics of sequen- tially designed adaptive nonlinear exp eriments. In Section 2, we will explore the asymptotic p erformance of maximum likeliho o d estimates based on dep endent observations generated by adaptive and sequentially designed exp eriments in a very general nonlinear set up, which amply covers situations o ccurring in prac- tice and mo dels studied in the literature. Unlike Chaudhuri and Mykland (1993), who considered a very sp eci c adaptive sequential scheme, our fo cus here will b e on general adaptive pro cedures for sequentially designing exp eriments and some related asymptotics. In Section 3, we will discuss the limiting b ehavior of some adaptive design pro cedures and work out some useful conditions that guarantee their large sample optimality with resp ect to a broad class of optimal design criteria. Once again, unlikeChaudhuri and Mykland (1993), who concentrated on D-optimal designs only, we will consider a general family of optimal design criteria that includes D-optimality and many other optimality criteria as sp ecial cases. In the course of the development of the principal theoretical results in Sections 2 and 3, we observe certain intriguing facts, and some interesting ques- tions, which arise naturally, remain unanswered at this moment. All technical pro ofs are presented in App endix. 424 PROBAL CHAUDHURI AND PER A. MYKLAND 2. Maximum Likeliho o d and Related Statistical Inference Supp ose now that the conditional distribution of the resp onse Y given X = x has a probability density function or probability mass function f (y j; x). Here the form of the function f is assumed to b e known, and is an unknown d-dimensional Euclidean parameter of interest that takes its values in (the parameter space), d which will be assumed to be a convex and op en subset of R . The value of the regressor X is determined by the exp erimenter, who cho oses it from a set (the exp eriment space) before each trial of the exp eriment. In applications, can b e a nite set (e.g. factorial exp eriments with each factor having a nite numb er of levels) or some appropriate compact (i.e. closed and b ounded) interval or region in an Euclidean space (e.g. when the regressor X is continuous in nature) or a mixture of the two (e.g. analysis of covariance typ e problems). As pointed out in Chaudhuri and Mykland (1993), the conditional distribution of Y given X = x mayinvolve an unknown nuisance parameter (e.g. the unknown error variance in a homoscedastic normal regression mo del) in addition to the parameter of principal interest .