an efficient semiparametric estimator for binary response models this paper proposes an estimator for discrete choice models that makes no assumption concerning the functional form of the choice probability function where this function can be characterized by an index the estimator is shown to be consistent asymptotically normally distributed and to achieve the semiparametric efficiency bound monte carlo evidence indicates that there may be only modest efficiency losses relative to maximum likelihood estimation when the distribution of the disturbances is known and that the small sample behavior of the estimator in other cases is good

nonparametric estimation of conditional quantile functions in the presence of irrelevant covariates abstract allowing for the existence of irrelevant covariates we study the problem of estimating a conditional quantile function nonparametrically with mixed discrete and continuous data we estimate the conditional quantile regression function using the check function based kernel method and suggest a data driven cross validation cv approach to simultaneously determine the optimal smoothing parameters and remove the irrelevant covariates when the number of covariates is large we first use a screening method to remove the irrelevant covariates and then apply the cv criterion to those that survive the screening procedure simulations and an empirical application demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed methods

tikhonov regularization and the l curve for large discrete ill posed problems discretization of linear inverse problems generally gives rise to very ill conditioned linear systems of algebraic equations typically the linear systems obtained have to be regularized to make the computation of a meaningful approximate solution possible tikhonov regularization is one of the most popular regularization methods a regularization parameter specifies the amount of regularization and in general an appropriate value of this parameter is not known a priori we review available iterative methods and present new ones for the determination of a suitable value of the regularization parameter by the l curve criterion and the solution of regularized systems of algebraic equations

uniformly semiparametric efficient estimation of treatment effects with a continuous treatment this article studies identification estimation and inference of general unconditional treatment effects models with continuous treatment under the ignorability assumption we show identification of the parameters of interest the dose response functions under the assumption that selection to treatment is based on observables we propose a semiparametric two step estimator and consider estimation of the dose response functions through moment restriction models with generalized residual functions that are possibly nonsmooth this general formulation includes average and quantile treatment effects as special cases the asymptotic properties of the estimator are derived namely uniform consistency weak convergence and semiparametric efficiency we also develop statistical inference procedures and establish the validity of a bootstrap approach to implement these methods in practice monte carlo simulations show that the proposed methods have good finite sample properties finally we apply the proposed

nonparametric censored and truncated regression we propose new estimators of the latent regression function in nonparametric cen sored and truncated regression models our estimators are computationally convenient consisting only of two nonparametric regressions and a univariate integral we establish consistency and asymptotic normality for an implementation based on local linear ker nel estimators an extension permits estimation in the presence of a general form of heteroscedasticity both the function m and the distribution f of the error e are unknown the errors are not assumed to be symmetric this paper provides a simple consistent estimator of m x k for some constant k under an additional tail condition we provide a consistent estimator of m x when m is the conditional mean function of the uncensored population also we show that f can be estimated given m x the proposed estimator is extended to deal with the truncated regression model where yi is only observed when it is not censored we also describe extensions to deal with a general form of heteroskedasticity in which the distribution of e could depend in unknown ways on a subset of elements of x for any continuously distributed element xk of x let mk x am x axk we also provide direct estimators of the derivatives mk x in both the censored and truncated regression models these derivatives are interpretable as the marginal effect of a change in x on the underlying uncensored population they can also be used to test or estimate parametric or semiparametric specifications of m x for example mk x is constant if m x is linear in xk and mk x depends only on xk if m x is additive in a function of xk

projection pursuit density estimation abstract the projection pursuit methodology is applied to the multivariate density estimation problem the resulting nonparametric procedure is often less biased than the kernel and near neighbor methods in addition graphical information is produced that can be used to help gain geometric insight into the multivariate data distribution

an alternative method of cross validation for the smoothing of density estimates cross validation with kullback leibler loss function has been applied to the choice of a smoothing parameter in the kernel method of density estimation a framework for this problem is constructed and used to derive an alternative method of cross validation based on integrated squared error recently also proposed by rudemo 1982 hall 1983 has established the consistency and asymptotic optimality of the new method for small and moderate sized samples the performances of the two methods of cross validation are compared on simulated data and specific examples

a family of nonparametric density estimation algorithms a new methodology for density estimation is proposed the methodology which builds on the one developed by tabak and vanden eijnden normalizes the data points through the composition of simple maps the parameters of each map are determined through the maximization of a local quadratic approximation to the log likelihood various candidates for the elementary maps of each step are proposed criteria for choosing one includes robustness computational simplicity and good behavior in high dimensional settings a good choice is that of localized radial expansions which depend on a single parameter all the complexity of arbitrary possibly convoluted probability densities can be built through the composition of such simple maps 2012 wiley periodicals inc

efficient estimation of average treatment effects using the estimated propensity score we are interested in estimating the average effect of a binary treatment on a scalar outcome if assignment to the treatment is exogenous or unconfounded that is independent of the potential outcomes given covariates biases associated with simple treatmentcontrol average comparisons can be removed by adjusting for differences in the covariates rosenbaum and rubin 1983 show that adjusting solely for differences between treated and control units in the propensity score removes all biases associated with differences in covariates although adjusting for differences in the propensity score removes all the bias this can come at the expense of efficiency as shown by hahn 1998 heckman ichimura and todd 1998 and robins mark and newey 1992 we show that weighting by the inverse of a nonparametric estimate of the propensity score rather than the true propensity score leads to an efficient estimate of the average treatment effect we provide intuition for this result by showing that this estimator can be interpreted as an empirical likelihood estimator that efficiently incorporates the information about the propensity score

the performance of estimators based on the propensity score we investigate the finite sample properties of a large number of estimators for the average treatment effect on the treated that are suitable when adjustment for observed covariates is required like inverse probability weighting kernel and other variants of matching as well as different parametric models the simulation design used is based on real data usually employed for the evaluation of labour market programmes in germany we vary several dimensions of the design that are of practical importance like sample size the type of the outcome variable and aspects of the selection process we find that trimming individual observations with too much weight as well as the choice of tuning parameters are important for all estimators a conclusion from our simulations is that a particular radius matching estimator combined with regression performs best overall in particular when robustness to misspecifications of the propensity score and different types of outcome variables is considered an important property

a crossvalidation method for estimating conditional densities summary we extend the idea of crossvalidation to choose the smoothing parameters of the double kernel local linear regression for estimating a conditional density our selection rule optimises the estimated conditional density function by minimising the integrated squared error we also discuss three other bandwidth selection rules an ad hoc method used by fan et al 1996 a bootstrap method of hall et al 1999 for bandwidth selection in the estimation of conditional distribution functions modified by bashtannyk hyndman 2001 to cover conditional density functions and finally a simple approach proposed by hyndman yao 2002 the performance of the new approach is compared with these three methods by simulation studies and our method performs outstandingly well the method is illustrated by an application to estimating the transition density and the value at risk of treasury bill data

nonparametric semiparametric estimation and testing of econometric models with data dependent smoothing parameters we consider nonparametric semiparametric estimation and testing of econometric models with data dependent smoothing parameters most of the existing works on asymptotic distributions of a nonparametric semiparametric estimator or a test statistic are based on some deterministic smoothing parameters while in practice it is important to use data driven methods to select the smoothing parameters in this paper we give a simple sufficient condition that can be used to establish the first order asymptotic equivalence of a nonparametric estimator or a test statistic with stochastic smoothing parameters to those using deterministic smoothing parameters we also allow for general weakly dependent data

cross validation and the estimation of conditional probability densities many practical problems especially some connected with forecasting require nonparametric estimation of conditional densities from mixed data for example given an explanatory data vector x for a prospective customer with components that could include the customer s salary occupation age sex marital status and address a company might wish to estimate the density of the expenditure y that could be made by that person basing the inference on observations of x y for previous clients choosing appropriate smoothing parameters for this problem can be tricky not in the least because plug in rules take a particularly complex form in the case of mixed data an obvious difficulty is that there exists no general formula for the optimal smoothing parameters more insidiously and more seriously it can be difficult to determine which components of x are relevant to the problem of conditional inference for example if the jth component of x is independent of y then that component is irrelevant to es

extent to which least squares cross validation minimises integrated square error in nonparametric density estimation let ho o and c be the windows which minimise mean integrated square error integrated square error and the least squares cross validatory criterion respectively for kernel density estimates it is argued that o not ho should be the benchmark for comparing different data driven approaches to the determination of window size asymptotic properties of ho o and c o and of differences between integrated square errors evaluated at these windows are derived it is shown that in comparison to the benchmark o the observable window c performs as well as the so called optimal but unattainable window ho to both first and second order

a class of smooth estimators for discrete distributions summary this paper presents a class of smooth weight function estimators for discrete distributions any estimator in the class depends on choosing a parameterized set of weights the resulting estimators are strongly consistent and asymptotically normal under mild regularity conditions a general procedure for choosing the weight function smoothing parameter is given along with specific solutions in some cases mean squared error comparisons with the maximum likelihood estimator based on large sample theory and small sample simulations are obtained typically the weight function estimates yield significantly smaller mean squared error in these comparisons

on the role of the propensity score in efficient semiparametric estimation of average treatment effects in this paper the role of the propensity score in the efficient estimation of average treatment effects is examined under the assumption that the treatment is ignorable given some observed characteristics it is shown that the propensity score is ancillary for estimation of the average treatment effects the propensity score is not ancillary for estimation of average treatment effects on the treated it is suggested that the marginal value of the propensity score lies entirely in the dimension reduction efficient semiparametric estimators of average treatment effects and average treatment effects on the treated are shown to take the form of relevant sample averages of the data completed by the nonparametric imputation method it is shown that the projection on the propensity score is not necessary for efficient semiparametric estimation of average treatment effects on the treated even if the propensity score is known an application to the experimental data reveals that conditioning on the propensity score may even result in a loss of efficiency

optimal bandwidth selection for conditional efficiency measures a data driven approach in productivity analysis an important issue is to detect how external environmental factors exogenous to the production process and not under the control of the producer might in uence the production process and the resulting efficiency of the rms most of the traditional approaches proposed in the literature have serious drawbacks an alternative approach is to describe the production process as being conditioned by a given value of the environmental variables cazals florens and simar 2002 daraio and simar 2005 this de nes conditional efficiency measures where the production set in the input output space may depend on the value of the external variables the statistical properties of nonparametric estimators of these conditional measures are now established jeong park and simar 2008 these involve the estimation of a nonstandard conditional distribution function which requires the speci cation of a smoothing parameter a bandwidth so far only the asymptotic optimal order of this bandwidth has been established this is of little interest for the practitioner in this paper we ll this gap and we propose a data driven technique for selecting this parameter in practice the approach based on a least squares cross validation procedure lscv provides an optimal bandwidth that minimizes an appropriate weighted integrated squared error ise the method is carefully described and exempli ed with some simulated data with univariate and multivariate environmental factors an application on real data performances of mutual funds illustrates how this new optimal method of bandwidth selection works in practice

a kernel based parametric method for conditional density estimation a conditional density function which describes the relationship between response and explanatory variables plays an important role in many analysis problems in this paper we propose a new kernel based parametric method to estimate conditional density an exponential function is employed to approximate the unknown density and its parameters are computed from the given explanatory variable via a nonlinear mapping using kernel principal component analysis kpca we develop a new kernel function which is a variant to polynomial kernels to be used in kpca the proposed method is compared with the nadaraya watson estimator through numerical simulation and practical data experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the nadaraya watson estimator in terms of revised mean integrated squared error rmise therefore the proposed method is an effective method for estimating the conditional densities

nontrivial zeros of weight 1 3j and 6j coefficients relation to diophantine equations of equal sums of like powers the nontrivial zeros of weight 1 3j and 6j coefficients given previously are shown to be the set of all such zeros the relation of these zeros to the solutions of well known diophantine equations is also discussed

nonparametric estimation of a generalized additive model with an unknown link function mean of a random scalar y conditional on a random vector x e rd let h x e yix x denote the conditional mean function this paper is concerned with estimating h under weak assumptions about its functional form when x is a multidimensional continuous random variable the paper describes a model that nests single index additive and multiplicative models and that can be estimated with a faster rate of convergence in probability than can a fully nonparametric model nonparametric estimation of h is usually unattractive when x is multidimensional the rate of convergence of nonparametric estimators decreases rapidly as the dimension of x increases and nonparametric estimates can be very imprecise with samples of practical size when x is multidimensional the curse of dimensionality this problem can be overcome through the use of dimension reduction methods they reduce the effective dimension of the estimation problem by making assumptions about the functional form of h that are stronger than those of a fully nonparametric estimator but weaker than those of a finite dimensional parametric model one method of dimension reduction is semiparametric single index modeling the best known and most easily estimated semiparametric single index model assumes that 1 1 h x g 3 x where 3 is an unknown d x 1 vector and g is an unknown function the vector 3 can be estimated with an n 1 2 rate of convergence in probability which is the rate that would be obtained if g were known han 1987 hardle and stoker 1989 horowitz and hardle 1996 ichimura 1993 klein and spady 1993 newey and stoker 1993 powell stock and stoker 1989 sherman 1993 stoker 1991 g can be estimated with the rate of convergence n r 2r 1 where r is an integer that depends on the smoothness of g but not on d dimension reduction can also be achieved by using a nonparametric generalized additive model in such a model