Composite quantile regression for varying-coefficient single-index models

ABSTRACT

The varying-coefficient single-index model (VCSIM) is a very general and flexible tool for exploring the relationship between a response variable and a set of predictors. Popular special cases include single-index models and varying-coefficient models. In order to estimate the index-coefficient and the non parametric varying-coefficients in the VCSIM, we propose a two-stage composite quantile regression estimation procedure, which integrates the local linear smoothing method and the information of quantile regressions at a number of conditional quantiles of the response variable. We establish the asymptotic properties of the proposed estimators for the index-coefficient and varying-coefficients when the error is heterogeneous. When compared with the existing mean-regression-based estimation method, our simulation results indicate that our proposed method has comparable performance for normal error and is more robust for error with outliers or heavy tail. We illustrate our methodologies with a real example.