README.md

In argminCS: Argmin Inference over a Discrete Candidate Set

argminCS

Welcome! Here we have source code to perform argmin hypothesis test.

Overview

The goal of argminCS is to produce confidence set of argmin from iid samples with a valid type 1 control, while exhibiting desirable statistical power. In particular, the method ‘softmin.LOO’ is the main innovative component in our paper Winners with Confidence: Argmin Inference over a High-Dimensional Discrete Candidate Set. Several other methods are also implemented within the package to ease method comparison and simulations.

Citation

If you use the argminCS package for your research or any experiment, please cite our paper “Winners with Confidence: Argmin Inference over a High-Dimensional Discrete Candidate Set”.

Installation

You can install the development version of argminCS from this GitHub webpage with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("xu3cl4/argminCS")

Example

This is a basic example which shows you how to solve a common problem:

library(argminCS)
dimension <- 4
sample.size <- 200
p <- 20
mu <- (1:p)/p
cov <- diag(length(mu))
set.seed(108)
data <- MASS::mvrnorm(sample.size, mu, cov)

## to test if 'dimension' is likely to be argmin with (default) softmin.LOO
difference.matrix <- matrix(rep(data[, dimension], p-1), 
                            ncol = p-1, 
                            byrow = FALSE) - data[, -dimension]
argmin.HT(difference.matrix, method='SML')
#> $test.stat.scale
#> [1] 2.274283
#> 
#> $critical.value
#> [1] 1.644854
#> 
#> $std
#> [1] 1
#> 
#> $ans
#> [1] "Reject"
#> 
#> $lambda
#> [1] 1.94368e+11
#> 
#> $lambda.capped
#> [1] TRUE
#> 
#> $residual.slepian
#> [1] 0
#> 
#> $variance.bound
#> [1] 0.0842562

## rather than perform a hypothesis testing for a specific dimension, 
## one can directly generate a discrete confidence set by 
CS.argmin(data, method='SML')
#> [1] 1 2

Detailed Tutorial

Here is a detailed tutorial.

Regarding other details of methods, we encourage users to install the package and check function documentation.

Loss Matrices

There are two differentially private loss matrices provided in this package for reproducibility. You can access them via

file_2023 <- system.file("extdata", "loss_matrix_2023_differentially_private.csv", package = "argminCS")
loss.2023 <- read.csv(file_2023)
head(loss.2023[,1:5])
#>   V1 V2 V3 V4 V5
#> 1  0  0  0  0  0
#> 2  0  0  0  0  0
#> 3  0  0  0  0  0
#> 4  0  1  0  0  0
#> 5  0  0  0  0  0
#> 6  0  0  0  0  0
dim(loss.2023)
#> [1] 183  44

file_2024 <- system.file("extdata", "loss_matrix_2024_differentially_private.csv", package = "argminCS")
loss.2024 <- read.csv(file_2024)
head(loss.2024[,1:5])
#>   V1 V2 V3 V4 V5
#> 1  0  0  0  1  0
#> 2  0  0  0  0  0
#> 3  0  0  0  0  0
#> 4  0  0  0  0  0
#> 5  0  0  0  0  0
#> 6  0  0  0  0  0
dim(loss.2024)
#> [1] 1236   39

Key References

Chernozhukov, V., D. Chetverikov, and K. Kato. 2013. “Testing Many Moment Inequalities.” RePEc.

Dey, N., M. Ryan, and J. P. Williams. 2024. “Anytime-Valid Generalized Universal Inference on Risk Minimizers.” *arXiv.org*. .

Futschik, Andreas, and Georg Pflug. 1995. “Confidence Sets for Discrete Stochastic Optimization.” *Annals of Operations Research* 56 (1): 95–108. .

Gupta, Shanti S. 1965. “On Some Multiple Decision (Selection and Ranking) Rules.” *Technometrics* 7 (2): 225–45. .

Lei, Jing. 2020. “Cross-Validation with Confidence.” *Journal of the American Statistical Association* 115 (532): 1978–97. .

Mogstad, Magne, Joseph P Romano, Azeem M Shaikh, and Daniel Wilhelm. 2024. “Inference for Ranks with Applications to Mobility Across Neighbourhoods and Academic Achievement Across Countries.” *Review of Economic Studies* 91 (1): 476–518.

Zhang, Tianyu, Hao Lee, and Jing Lei. 2024. “Winners with Confidence: Discrete Argmin Inference with an Application to Model Selection.” *arXiv Preprint arXiv:2408.02060*.

argminCS documentation built on Aug. 8, 2025, 7:51 p.m.