WEIGHTED SUMS OF NEGATIVELY ASSOCIATED RANDOM VARIABLES

In this paper, we establish strong laws for weighted sums of negatively associated (NA) random variables which have a higher‐order moment condition. Some results of Bai Z.D. & Cheng P.E. (2000) [Marcinkiewicz strong laws for linear statistics. Statist. and Probab. Lett. 43, 105–112,] and Sung S.K. (2001) [Strong laws for weighted sums of i.i.d. random variables, Statist. and Probab. Lett. 52, 413–419] are sharpened and extended from the independent identically distributed case to the NA setting. Also, one of the results of Li D.L. et al. (1995) [Complete convergence and almost sure convergence of weighted sums of random variables. J. Theoret. Probab. 8, 49–76,] is complemented and extended.     

RANDOM PERMUTATION TESTING IN MULTIPLE LINEAR REGRESSION

We developed an alternative random permutation testing method for multiple linear regression, which is an improvement over the existing one proposed by [1] Kennedy, P. E. 1995. Randomization tests in econometrics. Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, 13: 85–94. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] or [2] Freedman, D. and Lane, D. 1983. A nonstochastic interpretation of reported significance levels. Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, 1: 292–298. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar].     

QUASI-STATIONARY BEHAVIOUR IN THE RANDOM WALK WITH CONTINUOUS TIME

The long-term behaviour of the random walk on the positive integers is discussed. In particular, one distribution describing this behaviour when there is a non-zero drift in one direction, is shown to be of discrete gamma-type. Under the same condition, the effectively ultimate time to absorption is exponential.     

ON THE STRONG LAW OF LARGE NUMBERS UNDER REARRANGEMENTS FOR SEQUENCES OF BLOCKWISE ORTHOGONAL RANDOM ELEMENTS IN BANACH SPACES

The condition of the strong law of large numbers is obtained for sequences of random elements in type p Banach spaces that are blockwise orthogonal. The current work extends a result of Chobanyan & Mandrekar (2000) [On Kolmogorov SLLN under rearrangements for orthogonal random variables in a B ‐space. J. Theoret. Probab. 13, 135–139.] Special cases of the main results are presented as corollaries, and illustrative examples are provided.     

ON THE HILDRETH-HOUCK ESTIMATOR FOR RANDOM COEFFICIENT REGRESSION MODELS

This paper is concerned with the linear regression model in which the coefficients are random variables. The Hildreth-Houck method is considered for estimating the model. Sufficient conditions for the consistency of the Hildreth-Houck estimator are discussed and its asymptotic normality is established.     

BAYESIAN ANALYSIS OF THE LINEAR REGRESSION MODEL WITH NON-NORMAL DISTURBANCES

This paper considers the Bayesian analysis of a linear regression model with identically independently distributed non-normal disturbances. The distribution of disturbances is approximated by an Edgeworth series distribution with cumulants, of order higher than fourth, negligible. The posterior distribution of the regression coefficients vector is obtained under the assumption of a g-prior distribution for the parameters of the model. The Bayes estimator and its Bayes risk of the estimator are derived under a quadratic loss structure.     

THE DISTRIBUTION OF STOCHASTIC SHRINKAGE PARAMETERS IN RIDGE REGRESSION

ABSTRACT

In this article we derive the density and distribution functions of the stochastic shrinkage parameters of three well known operational Ridge Regression (RR) estimators by assuming normality. The stochastic behavior of these parameters is likely to affect the properties of the resulting RR estimator, therefore such knowledge can be useful in the selection of the shrinkage rule. Some numerical calculations are carried out to illustrate the behavior of these distributions, throwing light on the performance of the different RR estimators.     

SEPARATE VERSUS SYSTEM METHODS OF STEIN-RULE ESTIMATION IN SEEMINGLY UNRELATED REGRESSION MODELS

ABSTRACT

Despite the sizeable literature associated with the seemingly unrelated regression models, not much is known about the use of Stein-rule estimators in these models. This gap is remedied in this paper, in which two families of Stein-rule estimators in seemingly unrelated regression equations are presented and their large sample asymptotic properties explored and evaluated. One family of estimators uses a shrinkage factor obtained solely from the equation under study while the other has a shrinkage factor based on all the equations of the model. Using a quadratic loss measure and Monte-Carlo sampling experiments, the finite sample risk performance of these estimators is also evaluated and compared with the traditional feasible generalized least squares estimator.     

APPLICATION OF SEMIPARAMETRIC REGRESSION MODELS IN THE ANALYSIS OF CAPTURE-RECAPTURE EXPERIMENTS

If the capture probabilities in a capture‐recapture experiment depend on covariates, parametric models may be fitted and the population size may then be estimated. Here a semiparametric model for the capture probabilities that allows both continuous and categorical covariates is developed. Kernel smoothing and profile estimating equations are used to estimate the nonparametric and parametric components. Analytic forms of the standard errors are derived, which allows an empirical bias bandwidth selection procedure to be used to estimate the bandwidth. The method is evaluated in simulations and is applied to a real data set concerning captures of Prinia flaviventris, which is a common bird species in Southeast Asia.     

ON THE USE OF THE STEIN VARIANCE ESTIMATOR IN THE DOUBLE k-CLASS ESTIMATOR IN REGRESSION

This paper investigates the predictive mean squared error performance of a modified double k-class estimator by incorporating the Stein variance estimator. Recent studies show that the performance of the Stein rule estimator can be improved by using the Stein variance estimator. However, as we demonstrate below, this conclusion does not hold in general for all members of the double k-class estimators. On the other hand, an estimator is found to have smaller predictive mean squared error than the Stein variance-Stein rule estimator, over quite large parts of the parameter space.     

ROBUST VARIABLE SELECTION IN REGRESSION IN THE PRESENCE OF OUTLIERS AND LEVERAGE POINTS

In linear regression, outliers and leverage points often have large influence in the model selection process. Such cases are downweighted with Mallows-type weights here, during estimation of submodel parameters by generalised M-estimation. A robust version of Mallows's Cp (Ronchetti &. Staudte, 1994) is then used to select a variety of submodels which are as informative as the full model. The methodology is illustrated on a new dataset concerning the agglomeration of alumina in Bayer precipitation.     

SEMIPARAMETRIC ESTIMATION OF THE ERROR DISTRIBUTION IN MULTIVARIATE REGRESSION USING COPULAS

A semiparametric method is developed to estimate the dependence parameter and the joint distribution of the error term in the multivariate linear regression model. The nonparametric part of the method treats the marginal distributions of the error term as unknown, and estimates them using suitable empirical distribution functions. Then the dependence parameter is estimated by either maximizing a pseudolikelihood or solving an estimating equation. It is shown that this estimator is asymptotically normal, and a consistent estimator of its large sample variance is given. A simulation study shows that the proposed semiparametric method is better than the parametric ones available when the error distribution is unknown, which is almost always the case in practice. It turns out that there is no loss of asymptotic efficiency as a result of the estimation of regression parameters. An empirical example on portfolio management is used to illustrate the method.     

CONCOMITANT SCALE ESTIMATION IN REGRESSION PROBLEMS WITH INCREASING DIMENSION

We obtain Bahadur representations for the semi-interquartile range and the median deviation when these estimators are based on the residuals from a linear regression model with increasing dimension. These representations yield a variety of central limit theorems and conditions under which the two estimators are equivalent. In particular, the representations justify the use of the estimators as concomitant scale estimators in general scale equivariant M-estimation of a regression parameter when the dimension of the parameter increases with the sample size.     

THE GROUPING PROBLEM IN DISTRIBUTION-FREE PLANAR REGRESSION

In the planar regression model having two slope parameters and identically distributed errors, exact distribution-free inference about one parameter may be carried out by grouping the observations, eliminating the nuisance parameter and reducing the model to simple linear regression, allowing exact distribution-free methods for slope to be employed. This model reduction involves a loss of efficiency: the choice of an optimal grouping to minimize efficiency loss is discussed.     

AN EXAMINATION OF ESTIMATED RESIDUALS IN A REGRESSION WITH AN INFINITE ORDER PARAMETRIC MODEL

We consider a linear regression with the error term that obeys an autoregressive model of infinite order and estimate parameters of the models. The parameters of the autoregressive model should be estimated based on estimated residuals obtained by means of the method of ordinary least squares, because the errors are unobservable. The consistency of the coefficients, variance and spectral density of the model obeyed by the error term is shown. Further, we estimate the coefficients of the linear regression by means of the method of estimated generalized least squares. We also show the consistency of the estimator.

     

ON THE COVERAGE PROBABILITY OF CONFIDENCE INTERVALS IN REGRESSION AFTER VARIABLE SELECTION

This paper considers a linear regression model with regression parameter vector β. The parameter of interest is θ= a^Tβ where a is specified. When, as a first step, a data‐based variable selection (e.g. minimum Akaike information criterion) is used to select a model, it is common statistical practice to then carry out inference about θ, using the same data, based on the (false) assumption that the selected model had been provided a priori. The paper considers a confidence interval for θ with nominal coverage 1 ‐ α constructed on this (false) assumption, and calls this the naive 1 ‐ α confidence interval. The minimum coverage probability of this confidence interval can be calculated for simple variable selection procedures involving only a single variable. However, the kinds of variable selection procedures used in practice are typically much more complicated. For the real‐life data presented in this paper, there are 20 variables each of which is to be either included or not, leading to 2²⁰ different models. The coverage probability at any given value of the parameters provides an upper bound on the minimum coverage probability of the naive confidence interval. This paper derives a new Monte Carlo simulation estimator of the coverage probability, which uses conditioning for variance reduction. For these real‐life data, the gain in efficiency of this Monte Carlo simulation due to conditioning ranged from 2 to 6. The paper also presents a simple one‐dimensional search strategy for parameter values at which the coverage probability is relatively small. For these real‐life data, this search leads to parameter values for which the coverage probability of the naive 0.95 confidence interval is 0.79 for variable selection using the Akaike information criterion and 0.70 for variable selection using Bayes information criterion, showing that these confidence intervals are completely inadequate.     

ESTIMATING THE ROOT OF A NONPARAMETRIC REGRESSION FUNCTION IN A ROBUST FASHION

For a nonparametric regression model y = m(x)+e with n independent observations, we analyze a robust method of finding the root of m(x) based on an M-estimation first discussed by Härdle & Gasser (1984). It is shown here that the robustness properties (minimaxity and breakdown function) of such an estimate are quite analogous to those of an M -estimator in the simple location model, but the rate of convergence is somewhat limited due to the nonparametric nature of the problem.     

THE EXACT BIAS OF THE LOG-PERIODOGRAM REGRESSION ESTIMATOR

The paper makes two contributions. First, we provide a formula for the exact distribution of the periodogram evaluated at any arbitrary frequency, when the sample is taken from any zero-mean stationary Gaussian process. The inadequacy of the asymptotic distribution is demonstrated through an example in which the observations are generated by a fractional Gaussian noise process. The results are then applied in deriving the exact bias of the log-periodogram regression estimator (Geweke and Porter-Hudak (1983), Robinson (1995)). The formula is computable. Practical bounds on this bias are developed and their arithmetic mean is shown to be accurate and useful.