Adaptive estimation of linear functionals in functional linear models

We consider the estimation of the value of a linear functional of the slope parameter in functional linear regression, where scalar responses are modeled in dependence of randomfunctions. In Johannes and Schenk 2010] it has been shown that a plug-in estimator based on dimension reduction and additional thresholding can attain minimax optimal rates of convergence up to a constant. However, this estimation procedure requires an optimal choice of a tuning parameter with regard to certain characteristics of the slope function and the covariance operator associated with the functional regressor. As these are unknown in practice, we investigate a fully data-driven choice of the tuning parameter based on a combination of model selection and Lepski??s method, which is inspired by the recent work of Goldenshluger and Lepski 2011]. The tuning parameter is selected as theminimizer of a stochastic penalized contrast function imitating Lepski??smethod among a random collection of admissible values. We show that this adaptive procedure attains the lower bound for the minimax risk up to a logarithmic factor over a wide range of classes of slope functions and covariance operators. In particular, our theory covers pointwise estimation as well as the estimation of local averages of the slope parameter.