No Arabic abstract
The class of observation-driven models (ODMs) includes many models of non-linear time series which, in a fashion similar to, yet different from, hidden Markov models (HMMs), involve hidden variables. Interestingly, in contrast to most HMMs, ODMs enjoy likelihoods that can be computed exactly with computational complexity of the same order as the number of observations, making maximum likelihood estimation the privileged approach for statistical inference for these models. A celebrated example of general order ODMs is the GARCH$(p,q)$ model, for which ergodicity and inference has been studied extensively. However little is known on more general models, in particular integer-valued ones, such as the log-linear Poisson GARCH or the NBIN-GARCH of order $(p,q)$ about which most of the existing results seem restricted to the case $p=q=1$. Here we fill this gap and derive ergodicity conditions for general ODMs. The consistency and the asymptotic normality of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) can then be derived using the method already developed for first order ODMs.
Network analysis needs tools to infer distributions over graphs of arbitrary size from a single graph. Assuming the distribution is generated by a continuous latent space model which obeys certain natural symmetry and smoothness properties, we establish three levels of consistency for non-parametric maximum likelihood inference as the number of nodes grows: (i) the estimated locations of all nodes converge in probability on their true locations; (ii) the distribution over locations in the latent space converges on the true distribution; and (iii) the distribution over graphs of arbitrary size converges.
In this paper, we study the asymptotic normality of the conditional maximum likelihood (ML) estimators for the truncated regression model and the Tobit model. We show that under the general setting assumed in his book, the conjectures made by Hayashi (2000) footnote{see page 516, and page 520 of Hayashi (2000).} about the asymptotic normality of the conditional ML estimators for both models are true, namely, a sufficient condition is the nonsingularity of $mathbf{x_tx_t}$.
We prove the consistency of the Power-Law Fit PLFit method proposed by Clauset et al.(2009) to estimate the power-law exponent in data coming from a distribution function with regularly-varying tail. In the complex systems community, PLFit has emerged as the method of choice to estimate the power-law exponent. Yet, its mathematical properties are still poorly understood. The difficulty in PLFit is that it is a minimum-distance estimator. It first chooses a threshold that minimizes the Kolmogorov-Smirnov distance between the data points larger than the threshold and the Pareto tail, and then applies the Hill estimator to this restricted data. Since the number of order statistics used is random, the general theory of consistency of power-law exponents from extreme value theory does not apply. Our proof consists in first showing that the Hill estimator is consistent for general intermediate sequences for the number of order statistics used, even when that number is random. Here, we call a sequence intermediate when it grows to infinity, while remaining much smaller than the sample size. The second, and most involved, step is to prove that the optimizer in PLFit is with high probability an intermediate sequence, unless the distribution has a Pareto tail above a certain value. For the latter special case, we give a separate proof.
We study nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation of a log-concave probability density and its distribution and hazard function. Some general properties of these estimators are derived from two characterizations. It is shown that the rate of convergence with respect to supremum norm on a compact interval for the density and hazard rate estimator is at least $(log(n)/n)^{1/3}$ and typically $(log(n)/n)^{2/5}$, whereas the difference between the empirical and estimated distribution function vanishes with rate $o_{mathrm{p}}(n^{-1/2})$ under certain regularity assumptions.
We consider the problem of identifying parameters of a particular class of Markov chains, called Bernoulli Autoregressive (BAR) processes. The structure of any BAR model is encoded by a directed graph. Incoming edges to a node in the graph indicate that the state of the node at a particular time instant is influenced by the states of the corresponding parental nodes in the previous time instant. The associated edge weights determine the corresponding level of influence from each parental node. In the simplest setup, the Bernoulli parameter of a particular nodes state variable is a convex combination of the parental node states in the previous time instant and an additional Bernoulli noise random variable. This paper focuses on the problem of edge weight identification using Maximum Likelihood (ML) estimation and proves that the ML estimator is strongly consistent for two variants of the BAR model. We additionally derive closed-form estimators for the aforementioned two variants and prove their strong consistency.