A bandwidth selector for local polynomial fitting is proposed following the bootstrap idea, which is just a double smoothing bandwidth selector with a bootstrap variance estimator, defined as the mean squared residuals of a pilot estimate. No simulated resampling is required in this context,...

The non-parametric estimation of average causal effects in observational studies often relies on controlling for confounding covariates through smoothing regression methods such as kernel, splines or local polynomial regression. Such regression methods are tuned via smoothing parameters which...

Identifying patterns in bivariate data on a scatterplot remains a ba- sic statistical problem, with special flavor when both variables are on the same footing. Ideas of double, diagonal, and polar smoothing inspired by Cleveland and McGill’s 1984 paper in the Journal of the American...

We explore the evaluation (ranking) of point forecasts by a “stochastic loss distance” (SLD) criterion, under which we prefer forecasts with loss distributions F(L(e)) “close” to the unit step function at 0. We show that, surprisingly, ranking by SLD corresponds to ranking by expected loss.

Although economic processes and systems are in general simple in nature, the underlying dynamics are complicated and seldom understood. Recognizing this, in this paper we use a nonstationary-conditional Markov process model of observed aggregate data to learn about and recover causal influence...

We propose and explore several related ways of reducing reliance of point forecast accuracy evaluation on expected loss, E(L(e)), where e is forecast error. Our central approach dispenses with the loss function entirely, instead using a \stochastic error divergence" (SED) accuracy measure based...

We propose point forecast accuracy measures based directly on distance of the forecast-error c.d.f. from the unit step function at 0 (\stochastic error distance," or SED). We provide a precise characterization of the relationship between SED and standard predictive loss functions, showing that...

We consider estimation of the mean vector, <InlineEquation ID="IEq1"> <EquationSource Format="TEX">$$\theta $$</EquationSource> </InlineEquation>, of a spherically symmetric distribution with known scale parameter under quadratic loss and when a residual vector is available. We show minimaxity of generalized Bayes estimators corresponding to superharmonic priors with a non...</equationsource></inlineequation>