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Brown, Lawrence D.; Cai, T. Tony; Zhou, Harrison H.

Nonparametric regression in exponential families. (English) Zbl 1202.62050

Ann. Stat. 38, No. 4, 2005-2046 (2010).
Summary: Most results in nonparametric regression theory are developed only for the case of additive noise. In such a setting many smoothing techniques including wavelet thresholding methods have been developed and shown to be highly adaptive. We consider nonparametric regression in exponential families with the main focus on natural exponential families with a quadratic variance function, which include, for example, Poisson regression, binomial regression and gamma regression. We propose a unified approach of using a mean-matching variance stabilizing transformation to turn the relatively complicated problem of nonparametric regression in exponential families into a standard homoscedastic Gaussian regression problem. Then in principle any good nonparametric Gaussian regression procedure can be applied to the transformed data. To illustrate our general methodology, in this paper we use wavelet block thresholding to construct the final estimators of the regression function. The procedures are easily implementable. Both theoretical and numerical properties of the estimators are investigated. The estimators are shown to enjoy a high degree of adaptivity and spatial adaptivity with near-optimal asymptotic performance over a wide range of Besov spaces. The estimators also perform well numerically.

Cited in 1 Review
Cited in 16 Documents

MSC:

62G08 Nonparametric regression and quantile regression
62G20 Asymptotic properties of nonparametric inference
65C60 Computational problems in statistics (MSC2010)

Keywords:

adaptivity; asymptotic equivalence; exponential family; James-Stein estimator; nonparametric Gaussian regression; quadratic variance function; quantile coupling; wavelets
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References:

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