Model averaging for global Fréchet regression

Abstract

Non-Euclidean complex data analysis becomes increasingly popular in various fields of data science. In a seminal paper, Petersen and Müller (2019) generalized the notion of regression analysis to non-Euclidean response objects. Meanwhile, in the conventional regression analysis, model averaging has a long history and is widely applied in statistics literature. This paper studies the problem of optimal prediction for non-Euclidean objects by extending the method of model averaging. In particular, we generalize the notion of model averaging for global Fréchet regressions and establish an optimal property of the cross-validation to select the averaging weights in terms of the final prediction error. A simulation study illustrates excellent out-of-sample predictions of the proposed method.