Linear regression of interval-valued data based on complete information in hypercubes

Recent years have witnessed an increasing interest in interval-valued data analysis. As one of the core topics, linear regression attracts particular attention. It attempts to model the relationship between one or more explanatory variables and a response variable by fitting a linear equation to the interval-valued observations. Despite of the well-known methods such as CM, CRM and CCRM proposed in the literature, further study is still needed to build a regression model that can capture the complete information in interval-valued observations. To this end, in this paper, we propose the novel Complete Information Method (CIM) for linear regression modeling. By dividing hypercubes into informative grid data, CIM defines the inner product of interval-valued variables, and transforms the regression modeling into the computation of some inner products. Experiments on both the synthetic and real-world data sets demonstrate the merits of CIM in modeling interval-valued data, and avoiding the mathematical incoherence introduced by CM and CRM.