Often socio-economic variables are measured on a discrete scale or rounded to protect confidentiality. Nevertheless, when exploring the effect of a relevant covariate on the whole outcome distribution of a discrete response variable, virtually all common quantile regression methods require the...

We study the problem of selecting the optimal functional form among a set of non-nested nonlinear mean functions for a semiparametric kernel based regression model. To this end we consider Rissanen's minimum description length (MDL) principle. We prove the consistency of the proposed MDL...

Item response theory is one of the modern test theories with applications in educational and psychological testing. Recent developments made it possible to characterize some desired properties in terms of a collection of manifest ones, so that hypothesis tests on these traits can, in principle,...

In classical Bayesian inference the prior is treated as fixed, it is asymptotically negligible,thus any information contained in the prior is ignored from the asymptotic first order result.However, in practice often an informative prior is summarized from previous similar or the samekind of...

We propose and study a class of regression models, in which the mean function is specified parametrically as in the existing regression methods, but the residual distribution is modeled nonparametrically by a kernel estimator, without imposing any assumption on its distribution. This...