Probit Transformation for Kernel Density Estimation on the Unit Interval

2014
Kernel estimation of a probability density function supported on the unit interval has proved difficult, because of the well-known boundary bias issues a conventional kernel density estimator would necessarily face in this situation. Transforming the variable of interest into a variable whose density has unconstrained support, estimating that density, and obtaining an estimate of the density of the original variable through back-transformation, seems a natural idea to easily get rid of the boundary problems. In practice, however, a simple and efficient implementation of this methodology is far from immediate, and the few attempts found in the literature have been reported not to perform well. In this article, the main reasons for this failure are identified and an easy way to correct them is suggested. It turns out that combining the transformation idea with local likelihood density estimation produces viable density estimators, mostly free from boundary issues. Their asymptotic properties are derived, and a practical cross-validation bandwidth selection rule is devised. Extensive simulations demonstrate the excellent performance of these estimators compared to their main competitors for a wide range of density shapes. In fact, they turn out to be the best choice overall. Finally, they are used to successfully estimate a density of nonstandard shape supported on [0, 1] from a small-size real data sample.
JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN STATISTICAL ASSOCIATION
页码:346-358|卷号:109|期号:505
ISSN:0162-1459
来源机构
University of New South Wales Sydney
收录类型
SSCI
发表日期
2014
学科领域
循证社会科学-方法
国家
澳大利亚
语种
英语
DOI
10.1080/01621459.2013.842173
其他关键词
LOCAL LIKELIHOOD; BOUNDARY CORRECTION; ASYMPTOTICS; BANDWIDTH; BIAS
EISSN
1537-274X
资助机构
Faculty of Science, University of New South Wales, Sydney (Australia)
资助信息
The author was supported by a faculty research grant from the Faculty of Science, University of New South Wales, Sydney (Australia). The author is also grateful to Dr Z.I. Botev (UNSW) for providing the R code implementing the diffusion kernel estimator.
被引频次(WOS)
20
被引更新日期
2022-01
关键词
Boundary bias Local likelihood density estimation Local log-polynomial density estimation Transformation kernel density estimator