Solution-path convex clustering is combined with concave penalties by Ma and Huang (2017) to reduce clustering bias. Their method was introduced in the setting of single-response regression to handle heterogeneity. Such heterogeneity may come from either the regression intercepts or the regression slopes. The procedure, realized by the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm, can simultaneously identify the grouping structure of observations and estimate regression coefficients. In the first part of our work, we extend this procedure to multi-response regression. We propose models to solve cases with heterogeneity in either the regression intercepts or the regression slopes. We combine the existing gadgets of the ADMM algorithm and group-wise concave penalties to find solutions for the model. Our work improves model performance in both clustering accuracy and estimation accuracy. We also demonstrate the necessity of such extension through the fact that by utilizing information in multi-dimensional space, the performance can be greatly improved. In the second part, we introduce robust solutions to our proposed work. We introduce two approaches to handle outliers or long-tail distributions. The first is to replace the squared loss with robust loss, among which are absolute loss and Huber loss. The second is to characterize and remove outliers' effects by a mean-shift vector. We demonstrate that these robust solutions outperform the squared loss based method when outliers are present, or the underlying distribution is long-tailed. / Statistics

Blood products are essential components of any healthcare system, and their safety, in terms of being free of transfusion-transmittable infections, is crucial. While the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States requires all blood donations to be tested for a set of infections, it does not dictate which particular tests should be used by blood collection centers. Multiple FDA-licensed blood screening tests are available for each infection, but all screening tests are imperfectly reliable and have different costs. In addition, infection prevalence rates and several donor characteristics are uncertain, while surveillance methods are highly resource- and time-intensive. Therefore, only limited information is available to budget-constrained blood collection centers that need to devise a post-donation blood screening scheme so as to minimize the risk of an infectious donation being released into the blood supply. Our focus is on "robust" screening schemes under limited information. Toward this goal, we consider various objectives, and characterize structural properties of the optimal solutions under each objective. This allows us to gain insight and to develop efficient algorithms. Our research shows that using the proposed optimization-based approaches provides robust solutions with significantly lower expected infection risk compared to other testing schemes that satisfy the FDA requirements. Our findings have important public policy implications. / Ph. D.