Empirical Likelihood for a First-Order Generalized Random Coefficient Integer-Valued Autoregressive Process

Empirical likelihood for single-index models

This article develops empirical likelihood methodology for a class of long range dependent processes driven by a stationary Gaussian process. We consider population parameters that are defined by estimating equations in the time domain. It is shown that the standard block empirical likelihood (BEL) method, with a suitable scaling, has a non‐standard limit distribution based on a multiple Wiener–Itô integral. Unlike the short memory time series case, the scaling constant involves unknown population quantities that may be difficult to estimate. Alternative versions of the empirical likelihood method, involving the expansive BEL (EBEL) methods are considered. It is shown that the EBEL renditions do not require an explicit scaling and, therefore, remove this undesirable feature of the standard BEL. However, the limit law involves the long memory parameter, which may be estimated from the data. Results from a moderately large simulation study on finite sample properties of tests and confidence intervals based on different empirical likelihood methods are also reported.

Empirical likelihood based on synthetic right censored data

In this paper, we not only construct the confidence region for parameters in a mixed integer-valued autoregressive process using the empirical likelihood method, but also establish the empirical log-likelihood ratio statistic and obtain its limiting distribution. And then, via simulation studies we give coverage probabilities for the parameters of interest. The results show that the empirical likelihood method performs very well.

We investigate empirical likelihood for the additive hazards model with current status data. An empirical log-likelihood ratio for a vector or subvector of regression parameters is defined and its limiting distribution is shown to be a standard chi-squared distribution. The proposed inference procedure enables us to make empirical likelihood-based inference for the regression parameters. Finite sample performance of the proposed method is assessed in simulation studies to compare with that of a normal approximation method, it shows that the empirical likelihood method provides more accurate inference than the normal approximation method. A real data example is used for illustration.

By introducing the notion of “empirical likelihood function of observing sums”, unequally-spaced time series data and longitudinal data generated from Levy processes can be analyzed. Characteristic function is further incorporated to handle the situations where the density function of the increments is difficult to obtain. In the situations where both characteristic function and the density function are available, it is shown through the simulation examples that the proposed empirical maximum likelihood method does not suffer from significant information loss comparing to the maximum likelihood estimation method. The performances of the proposed method is tested for both equally-spaced and unequally-spaced observations.

Spatial dynamic panel data (SDPD) models have received great attention in economics in recent 10 years. Existing approaches for the estimation and test of SDPD models are quasi-maximum likelihood (QML) approach and generalized method of moments (GMM). In this article, we introduce the empirical likelihood (EL) method to the statistical inference for SDPD models. The EL ratio statistics are constructed for the parameters of spatial dynamic panel data models. It is shown that the limiting distributions of the empirical likelihood ratio statistics are chi-squared distributions, which are used to construct confidence regions for the parameters of the models. Simulation results show that the EL based confidence regions outperform the normal approximation based confidence regions.

This article studies the empirical likelihood method for long‐memory time series models. By virtue of the Whittle likelihood, one obtains a score function that can be viewed as an estimating equation of the parameters of a fractional integrated autoregressive moving average (ARFIMA) model. This score function is used to obtain an empirical likelihood ratio which is shown to be asymptotically chi‐square distributed. Confidence regions for the parameters are constructed based on the asymptotic distribution of the empirical likelihood ratio. Bartlett correction and finite sample properties of the empirical likelihood confidence regions are examined.

In this article, we consider the application of the empirical likelihood method to a partially linear single-index model. We focus on the case where some covariates are measured with additive errors. It is shown that the empirical log-likelihood ratio at the true parameter converges to the standard chi-square distribution. Simulations show that the proposed confidence region has coverage probability which is closer to the nominal level, as well as narrower than those of normal approximation method. A real data example is given.

Empirical likelihood based inference for semiparametric varying coefficient partially linear models with error-prone linear covariates

Pretest–posttest studies are an important and popular method for assessing the effectiveness of a treatment or an intervention in many scientific fields. While the treatment effect, measured as the difference between the two mean responses, is of primary interest, testing the difference of the two distribution functions for the treatment and the control groups is also an important problem. The Mann–Whitney test has been a standard tool for testing the difference of distribution functions with two independent samples. We develop empirical likelihood-based (EL) methods for the Mann–Whitney test to incorporate the two unique features of pretest–posttest studies: (i) the availability of baseline information for both groups; and (ii) the structure of the data with missing by design. Our proposed methods combine the standard Mann–Whitney test with the EL method of Huang, Qin and Follmann [(2008), ‘Empirical Likelihood-Based Estimation of the Treatment Effect in a Pretest–Posttest Study’, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 103(483), 1270–1280], the imputation-based empirical likelihood method of Chen, Wu and Thompson [(2015), ‘An Imputation-Based Empirical Likelihood Approach to Pretest–Posttest Studies’, The Canadian Journal of Statistics accepted for publication], and the jackknife empirical likelihood method of Jing, Yuan and Zhou [(2009), ‘Jackknife Empirical Likelihood’, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 104, 1224–1232]. Theoretical results are presented and finite sample performances of proposed methods are evaluated through simulation studies.

Kendall and Gehan estimating functions are commonly used to estimate the regression parameter in accelerated failure time model with censored observations in survival analysis. In this paper, we apply the jackknife empirical likelihood method to overcome the computation difficulty about interval estimation. A Wilks’ theorem of jackknife empirical likelihood for U-statistic type estimating equations is established, which is used to construct the confidence intervals for the regression parameter. We carry out an extensive simulation study to compare the Wald-type procedure, the empirical likelihood method, and the jackknife empirical likelihood method. The proposed jackknife empirical likelihood method has a better performance than the existing methods. We also use a real data set to compare the proposed methods.

For regression analysis of doubly truncated data, we propose two empirical likelihood (EL) inference approaches, called non-smooth EL and non-smooth Jackknife EL (JEL), to make inference about regression parameters based on the generalized estimating equations of existing weighted rank estimators. The limiting distributions of non-smooth log-EL and log-JEL ratios statistics are derived and non-smooth EL, and JEL confidence intervals for any specified component of regression parameters are obtained. We carry out extensive simulation studies to compare the proposed approaches with the random weighting (RW) approach. The simulation results demonstrate that the non-smooth EL and JEL confidence intervals have better performances than the RW confidence intervals based on coverage probability and average length of confidence intervals of regression parameters when the dependent variable is subject to the double truncation. A real data example is provided to illustrate the proposed approaches.

Summary This paper is concerned with empirical likelihood inference on the population mean when the dimension $p$ and the sample size $n$ satisfy $p/n\rightarrow c\in [1,\infty)$. As shown in Tsao (2004), the empirical likelihood method fails with high probability when $p/n>1/2$ because the convex hull of the $n$ observations in $\mathbb{R}^p$ becomes too small to cover the true mean value. Moreover, when $p> n$, the sample covariance matrix becomes singular, and this results in the breakdown of the first sandwich approximation for the log empirical likelihood ratio. To deal with these two challenges, we propose a new strategy of adding two artificial data points to the observed data. We establish the asymptotic normality of the proposed empirical likelihood ratio test. The proposed test statistic does not involve the inverse of the sample covariance matrix. Furthermore, its form is explicit, so the test can easily be carried out with low computational cost. Our numerical comparison shows that the proposed test outperforms some existing tests for high-dimensional mean vectors in terms of power. We also illustrate the proposed procedure with an empirical analysis of stock data.

The coefficient of variation (CV) is a widely used scaleless measure of variability in many disciplines. However the inference for the CV is limited to parametric methods or standard bootstrap. In this paper we propose two nonparametric methods aiming to construct confidence intervals for the coefficient of variation. The first one is to apply the empirical likelihood after transforming the original data. The second one is a modified jackknife empirical likelihood method. We also propose bootstrap procedures for calibrating the test statistics. Results from our simulation studies suggest that the proposed methods, particularly the empirical likelihood method with bootstrap calibration, are comparable to existing methods for normal data and yield better coverage probabilities for nonnormal data. We illustrate our methods by applying them to two real-life datasets.