Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Self-Consistency: A Fundamental Concept In Statistics, Thaddeus Tarpey, Bernard Flury

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Publications

The term ''self-consistency'' was introduced in 1989 by Hastie and Stuetzle to describe the property that each point on a smooth curve or surface is the mean of all points that project orthogonally onto it. We generalize this concept to self-consistent random vectors: a random vector Y is self-consistent for X if E[X|Y] = Y almost surely. This allows us to construct a unified theoretical basis for principal components, principal curves and surfaces, principal points, principal variables, principal modes of variation and other statistical methods. We provide some general results on self-consistent random variables, give …