The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve is a fundamental tool to assess the discriminant performance for not only a single marker but also a score function combining multiple markers. The area under the ROC curve (AUC) for a score function measures the intrinsic ability for the score function to discriminate between the controls and cases. Recently, the partial AUC (pAUC) has been paid more attention than the AUC, because a suitable range of the false positive rate can be focused according to various clinical situations. However, existing pAUC-based methods only handle a few markers and do not take nonlinear combination of markers into consideration.

We discuss a one-parameter family of generalized cross entropy between two distributions with the power index, called the projective power entropy. The cross entropy is essentially reduced to the Tsallis entropy if two distributions are taken to be equal. Statistical and probabilistic properties associated with the projective power entropy are extensively investigated including a characterization problem of which conditions uniquely determine the projective power entropy up to the power index. A close relation of the entropy with the Lebesgue space L_p and the dual L_q is explored, in which the escort distribution associates with an interesting property. When we consider maximum Tsallis entropy distributions under the constraints of the mean vector and variance matrix, the model becomes a multivariate q-Gaussian model with elliptical contours, including a Gaussian and t-distribution model. We discuss the statistical estimation by minimization of the empirical loss associated with the projective power entropy. It is shown that the minimum loss estimator for the mean vector and variance matrix under the maximum entropy model are the sample mean vector and the sample variance matrix. The escort distribution of the maximum entropy distribution plays the key role for the derivation.

We discuss a special class of generalized divergence measures by the use of generator functions. Any divergence measure in the class is separated into the difference between cross and diagonal entropy. The diagonal entropy measure in the class associates with a model of maximum entropy distributions; the divergence measure leads to statistical estimation via minimization, for arbitrarily giving a statistical model. The dualistic relationship between the maximum entropy model and the minimum divergence estimation is explored in the framework of information geometry. The model of maximum entropy distributions is characterized to be totally geodesic with respect to the linear connection associated with the divergence. A natural extension for the classical theory for the maximum likelihood method under the maximum entropy model in terms of the Boltzmann-Gibbs-Shannon entropy is given. We discuss the duality in detail for Tsallis entropy as a typical example.

Clustering is a major unsupervised learning algorithm and is widely applied in data mining and statistical data analyses. Typical examples include k-means, fuzzy c-means, and Gaussian mixture models, which are categorized into hard, soft, and model-based clusterings, respectively. We propose a new clustering, called Pareto clustering, based on the Kolmogorov–Nagumo average, which is defined by a survival function of the Pareto distribution. The proposed algorithm incorporates all the aforementioned clusterings plus maximum-entropy clustering. We introduce a probabilistic framework for the proposed method, in which the underlying distribution to give consistency is discussed. We build the minorize-maximization algorithm to estimate the parameters in Pareto clustering. We compare the performance with existing methods in simulation studies and in benchmark dataset analyses to demonstrate its highly practical utilities.

Summary: In the classic discriminant model of two multivariate normal distributions with equal variance matrices, the linear discriminant function is optimal both in terms of the log likelihood ratio and in terms of maximizing the standardized difference (the t-statistic) between the means of the two distributions. In a typical case–control study, normality may be sensible for the control sample but heterogeneity and uncertainty in diagnosis may suggest that a more flexible model is needed for the cases. We generalize the t-statistic approach by finding the linear function which maximizes a standardized difference but with data from one of the groups (the cases) filtered by a possibly nonlinear function U. We study conditions for consistency of the method and find the function U which is optimal in the sense of asymptotic efficiency. Optimality may also extend to other measures of discriminatory efficiency such as the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve. The optimal function U depends on a scalar probability density function which can be estimated non-parametrically using a standard numerical algorithm. A lasso-like version for variable selection is implemented by adding -regularization to the generalized t-statistic. Two microarray data sets in the study of asthma and various cancers are used as motivating examples.