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Spline smoothing and optimal rates of convergence in nonparametric regression models. (English) Zbl 0585.62074
Summary: Linear estimation is considered in nonparametric regression models of the form $$Y_ i=f(x_ i)+\epsilon_ i,\quad x_ i\in (a,b),$$ where the zero mean errors are uncorrelated with common variance $$\sigma^ 2$$ and the response function f is assumed only to have a bounded square integrable qth derivative.
The linear estimator which minimizes the maximum mean squared error summed over the observation points is derived, and the exact minimax rate of convergence is obtained.
For practical problems where bounds on $$\| f^{(q)}\|^ 2$$ and $$\sigma^ 2$$ may be unknown, generalized cross-validation is shown to give an adaptive estimator which achieves the minimax optimal rate under the additional assumption of normality.

##### MSC:
 62G05 Nonparametric estimation 62J05 Linear regression; mixed models 41A15 Spline approximation
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