Universal Inference with Composite Likelihoods

Abstract: Wasserman et al. (2020, PNAS, vol. 117, pp. 16880-16890) constructed estimator agnostic and finite-sample valid confidence sets and hypothesis tests, using split-data likelihood ratio-based statistics. We demonstrate that the same approach extends to the use of split-data composite likelihood ratios as well, and thus establish universal methods for conducting multivariate inference when the data generating process is only known up to marginal and conditional relationships between the coordinates. Always-valid sequential inference is also considered.