This paper presents a new method for spatially adaptive local likelihood estimation which applies to a broad class of nonparametric models, including the Gaussian, Poisson and binary response models. The main idea of themethod is given a sequence of local likelihood estimates (``weak´´...

A local likelihood density estimator is shown to have asymptotic bias depending on the dimension of the local parameterization. Comparing with kernel estimation it is demonstrated using a variety of bandwidths that we may obtain as good and potentially even better estimates using local...

We are interested in modeling the mortality of long-term care (LTC) claimants having the same level of severeness (heavy claimant). Practitioners often use empirical methods that rely heavily on expert opinions. We propose approaches not depending on an expert’s advice. We analyze the...

This paper develops models aimed at more accurate estimation of the medical cost function based on the individual cost data. In our proposed models, the cost data are assumed to be dependent on the whole clinical evolution via Markov transition probabilities, and the accumulative rate of cost in...

In this paper we propose a very flexible estimator in the context of truncated regression that does not require parametric assumptions. To do this, we adapt the theory of local maximum likelihood estimation. We provide the asymptotic results and illustrate the performance of our estimator on...

SiZer (SIgnificant ZERo crossing of the derivatives) is a graphical scale-space visualization tool that allows for exploratory data analysis with statistical inference. Various SiZer tools have been developed in the last decade, but most of them are not appropriate when the response variable...

This article studies the estimation of production frontiers and efficiency scores when the commodity of interest is an economic bad with a discrete distribution. Existing parametric econometric techniques (stochastic frontier methods) assume that output is a continuous random variable but, if...

This note uses the established connection between the local-EM and EMS algorithms to explore methods for smoothing mismeasured data. Implementations of local-EM are developed for several forms of censored and/or mismeasured data and their connections with other methods explored.

It is a common view among finance analysts and econometricians that the correlation between financial objects becomes stronger as the market is going down, and that it approaches one when the market crashes, having the effect of destroying the benefit of diversification. The purpose of this...