The noise level in linear regression with dependent data

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 (NeurIPS 2023) Main Conference Track

Bibtex Paper

Authors

Ingvar Ziemann, Stephen Tu, George J. Pappas, Nikolai Matni

Abstract

We derive upper bounds for random design linear regression with dependent ($\beta$-mixing) data absent any realizability assumptions. In contrast to the strictly realizable martingale noise regime, no sharp \emph{instance-optimal} non-asymptotics are available in the literature. Up to constant factors, our analysis correctly recovers the variance term predicted by the Central Limit Theorem---the noise level of the problem---and thus exhibits graceful degradation as we introduce misspecification. Past a burn-in, our result is sharp in the moderate deviations regime, and in particular does not inflate the leading order term by mixing time factors.