Open Access
2020 The limiting behavior of isotonic and convex regression estimators when the model is misspecified
Eunji Lim
Electron. J. Statist. 14(1): 2053-2097 (2020). DOI: 10.1214/20-EJS1714
Abstract

We study the asymptotic behavior of the least squares estimators when the model is possibly misspecified. We consider the setting where we wish to estimate an unknown function $f_{*}:(0,1)^{d}\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ from observations $(X,Y),(X_{1},Y_{1}),\cdots ,(X_{n},Y_{n})$; our estimator $\hat{g}_{n}$ is the minimizer of $\sum _{i=1}^{n}(Y_{i}-g(X_{i}))^{2}/n$ over $g\in \mathcal{G}$ for some set of functions $\mathcal{G}$. We provide sufficient conditions on the metric entropy of $\mathcal{G}$, under which $\hat{g}_{n}$ converges to $g_{*}$ as $n\rightarrow \infty $, where $g_{*}$ is the minimizer of $\|g-f_{*}\|\triangleq \mathbb{E}(g(X)-f_{*}(X))^{2}$ over $g\in \mathcal{G}$. As corollaries of our theorem, we establish $\|\hat{g}_{n}-g_{*}\|\rightarrow 0$ as $n\rightarrow \infty $ when $\mathcal{G}$ is the set of monotone functions or the set of convex functions. We also make a connection between the convergence rate of $\|\hat{g}_{n}-g_{*}\|$ and the metric entropy of $\mathcal{G}$. As special cases of our finding, we compute the convergence rate of $\|\hat{g}_{n}-g_{*}\|^{2}$ when $\mathcal{G}$ is the set of bounded monotone functions or the set of bounded convex functions.

Eunji Lim "The limiting behavior of isotonic and convex regression estimators when the model is misspecified," Electronic Journal of Statistics 14(1), 2053-2097, (2020). https://doi.org/10.1214/20-EJS1714
Received: 1 July 2019; Published: 2020
Vol.14 • No. 1 • 2020
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