Estimation of Kullback–Leibler Divergence by Local Likelihood

Motivated from the bandwidth selection problem in local likelihood density estimation and from the problem of assessing a final model chosen by a certain model selection procedure, we consider estimation of the Kullback–Leibler divergence. It is known that the best bandwidth choice for the local likelihood density estimator depends on the distance between the true density and the ‘vehicle’ parametric model. Also, the Kullback–Leibler divergence may be a useful measure based on which one judges how far the true density is away from a parametric family. We propose two estimators of the Kullback-Leibler divergence. We derive their asymptotic distributions and compare finite sample properties. Research of Young Kyung Lee was supported by the Brain Korea 21 Projects in 2004. Byeong U. Park’s research was supported by KOSEF through Statistical Research Center for Complex Systems at Seoul National University.     

Optimal kernel estimation of spot volatility of stochastic differential equations

A unified framework to optimally select the bandwidth and kernel function of spot volatility kernel estimators is put forward. The proposed models include not only classical Brownian motion driven dynamics but also volatility processes that are driven by long-memory fractional Brownian motions or other Gaussian processes. We characterize the leading order terms of the mean squared error, which in turn enables us to determine an explicit formula for the leading term of the optimal bandwidth. Central limit theorems for the estimation error are also obtained. A feasible plug-in type bandwidth selection procedure is then proposed, for which, as a sub-problem, a new estimator of the volatility of volatility is developed. The optimal selection of the kernel function is also investigated. For Brownian Motion type volatilities, the optimal kernel turns out to be an exponential function, while, for fractional Brownian motion type volatilities, easily implementable numerical results to compute the optimal kernels are devised. Simulation studies further confirm the good performance of the proposed methods.     

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In the situation of \rho-mixing dependent sequences, this paper studied the mean square error and the optimal bandwidth of distribution kernel estimator nu_{p,h} of VaR. And the optimal bandwidth minimized the mean square error. The density function of Laplace distribution is used in the calculation of bandwidth and we adopt the method of interpolation to compute specific value of bandwidth in this paper. According to the numerical simulations, the distribution kernel estimator is more accurate by comparing the performance of VaR distribution kernel estimation with a common order statistic. Finally, Shangzheng A-share index and Shenzheng B-share index are chosen for an empirical research, which concludes that the risk of the latter is significantly higher than that of the former.     

Asymptotic normality of Powell’s kernel estimator

We establish asymptotic normality of Powell’s kernel estimator for the asymptotic covariance matrix of the quantile regression estimator for both i.i.d. and weakly dependent data. As an application, we derive the optimal bandwidth that minimizes the approximate mean squared error of the kernel estimator. We also derive the corresponding results to censored quantile regression.     

Birnbaum–Saunders power-exponential kernel density estimation and Bayes local bandwidth selection for nonnegative heavy tailed data

In this paper, we study the performance of the Birnbaum–Saunders-power-exponential (BS-PE) kernel and Bayesian local bandwidth selection in the context of kernel density estimation for nonnegative heavy tailed data. Our approach considers the BS-PE kernel estimator and treats locally the bandwidth h as a parameter with prior distribution. The posterior density of h at each point x (point where the density is estimated) is derived in closed form, and the Bayesian bandwidth selector is obtained by using popular loss functions. The performance evaluation of this new procedure is carried out by a simulation study and real data in web-traffic. The proposed method is very quick and very competitive in comparison with the existing global methods, namely biased cross-validation and unbiased cross-validation.     

Contribution to the bandwidth choice for kernel density estimates

In the present paper we focus on the problem of the bandwidth choice for the kernel density estimates. The problem of finding the optimal bandwidth belongs to the crucial problems of the kernel estimates. As a criterion of quality of the estimates the L ₂ type measure is used. A special iterative method based on a relevant estimation of mean integrated square error given in papers Müller and Wang (Prob Theor Relat Fields 85:523–538, 1990), Jones et al. (Ann Stat 19:1919–1932, 1991) is suggested. Moreover the idea of maximal smoothing principle (Terrell in J Am Stat Assoc 85:470–477, 1990) is extended to the higher order kernels. A simulation study brings a comparison of the proposed method and the cross-validation method. Research supported by the GACR:402/04/1308.     

Plug-in method for nonparametric regression

The problem of bandwidth selection for non-parametric kernel regression is considered. We will follow the Nadaraya–Watson and local linear estimator especially. The circular design is assumed in this work to avoid the difficulties caused by boundary effects. Most of bandwidth selectors are based on the residual sum of squares (RSS). It is often observed in simulation studies that these selectors are biased toward undersmoothing. This leads to consideration of a procedure which stabilizes the RSS by modifying the periodogram of the observations. As a result of this procedure, we obtain an estimation of unknown parameters of average mean square error function (AMSE). This process is known as a plug-in method. Simulation studies suggest that the plug-in method could have preferable properties to the classical one. Supported by the MSMT: LC 06024.     

On a mapping approach to investigating the bootstrap accuracy

Summary. A simple mapping approach is proposed to study the bootstrap accuracy in a rather general setting. It is demonstrated that the bootstrap accuracy can be obtained through this method for a broad class of statistics to which the commonly used Edgeworth expansion approach may not be successfully applied. We then consider some examples to illustrate how this approach may be used to find the bootstrap accuracy and show the advantage of the bootstrap approximation over the Gaussian approximation. For the multivariate Kolmogorov–Smirnov statistic, we show the error of bootstrap approximation is as small as that of the Gaussian approximation. For the multivariate kernel type density estimate, we obtain an order of the bootstrap error which is smaller than the order of the error of the Gaussian approximation given in Rio (1994). We also consider an application of the bootstrap accuracy for empirical process to that for the copula process. Received: 23 June 1995 / In revised form: 18 June 1996     

Statistical estimation in varying coefficient models with surrogate data and validation sampling

Varying coefficient error-in-covariables models are considered with surrogate data and validation sampling. Without specifying any error structure equation, two estimators for the coefficient function vector are suggested by using the local linear kernel smoothing technique. The proposed estimators are proved to be asymptotically normal. A bootstrap procedure is suggested to estimate the asymptotic variances. The data-driven bandwidth selection method is discussed. A simulation study is conducted to evaluate the proposed estimating methods.     

Optimal learning for sequential sampling with non-parametric beliefs

We propose a sequential learning policy for ranking and selection problems, where we use a non-parametric procedure for estimating the value of a policy. Our estimation approach aggregates over a set of kernel functions in order to achieve a more consistent estimator. Each element in the kernel estimation set uses a different bandwidth to achieve better aggregation. The final estimate uses a weighting scheme with the inverse mean square errors of the kernel estimators as weights. This weighting scheme is shown to be optimal under independent kernel estimators. For choosing the measurement, we employ the knowledge gradient policy that relies on predictive distributions to calculate the optimal sampling point. Our method allows a setting where the beliefs are expected to be correlated but the correlation structure is unknown beforehand. Moreover, the proposed policy is shown to be asymptotically optimal.