The advance of technology facilitates the collection of statistical data. Flexible and refined statistical models are widely sought in a large array of statistical problems. The question arises frequently whether or not a family of parametric or nonparametric models fit adequately the given data. In this paper we give a selective overview on nonparametric inferences using generalized likelihood ratio (<i>GLR</i>) statistics. We introduce generalized likelihood ratio statistics to test various null hypotheses against nonparametric alternatives. The trade-off between the flexibility of alternative models and the power of the statistical tests is emphasized. Well-established Wilks phenomena are discussed for a variety of semi- and non-parametric models, which sheds light on other research using <i>GLR</i> tests. Anumber of open topics worthy of further study are given in a discussion section.

Local quasilikelihood estimation is a useful extension of local least squares methods, but its computational cost and algorithmic convergence problems make the procedure less appealing, particularly when it is iteratively used in methods such as the backfitting algorithm, crossvalidation and bootstrapping. A onestep local quasilikelihood estimator is introduced to overcome the computational drawbacks of the local quasilikelihood method. We demonstrate that as long as the initial estimators are reasonably good, the onestep estimator has the same asymptotic behaviour as the local quasilikelihood method. Our simulation shows that the onestep estimator performs at least as well as the local quasilikelihood method for a wide range of choices of bandwidths. A datadriven bandwidth selector is proposed for the onestep estimator based on the preasymptotic substitution method of Fan and Gijbels. It is

Error variance estimation plays an important role in statistical inference for high-dimensional regression models. This article concerns with error variance estimation in high-dimensional sparse additive model. We study the asymptotic behavior of the traditional mean squared errors, the naive estimate of error variance, and show that it may significantly underestimate the error variance due to spurious correlations that are even higher in nonparametric models than linear models. We further propose an accurate estimate for error variance in ultrahigh-dimensional sparse additive model by effectively integrating sure independence screening and refitted cross-validation techniques. The root <i>n</i> consistency and the asymptotic normality of the resulting estimate are established. We conduct Monte Carlo simulation study to examine the finite sample performance of the newly proposed estimate. A real data example is used to