This paper studies a weighted local linear regression smoother for longitudinal/clustered data, which takes a form similar to the classical weighted least squares estimate. As a hybrid of the methods of Chen and Jin (2005) and Wang (2003), the proposed local linear smoother maintains the advantages of both methods in computational and theoretical simplicity, variance minimization and bias reduction. Moreover, the proposed smoother is optimal in the sense that it attains linear minimax efficiency when the within-cluster correlation is correctly specified. In the special case that the joint density of covariates in a cluster exists and is continuous, any working within-cluster correlation would lead to linear minimax efficiency for the proposed method.

Factor modeling is an essential tool for exploring intrinsic dependence structures among high-dimensional random variables. Much progress has been made for estimating the covariance matrix from a high-dimensional factor model. However, the blessing of dimensionality has not yet been fully embraced in the literature: much of the available data are often ignored in constructing covariance matrix estimates. If our goal is to accurately estimate a covariance matrix of a set of targeted variables, shall we employ additional data, which are beyond the variables of interest, in the estimation? In this article, we provide sufficient conditions for an affirmative answer, and further quantify its gain in terms of Fisher information and convergence rate. In fact, even an oracle-like result (as if all the factors were known) can be achieved when a sufficiently large number of variables is used. The idea of using data as much as possible

We provide a new insight of the difficulty of nonparametric estimation of a whole function. A new method is invented for finding a minimax lower bound of globally estimating a function. The idea is to adjust automatically the direction to the nearly hardest I-dimensional subproblem at each location, and to use locally the difficulty of I-dimensional subproblem. In a variety of contexts, our method can give not only attainable global rates, but also constant factors. Comparing with the existing techniques, our method has the advantages of being easily implemented and understood, and can give constant factors as well.

An effective bandwidth selection method for local linear regression is proposed in Fan and Gijbels [1995, J. Roy. Statist. Soc. Ser. B, 57, 371394]. The method is based on the idea of the pre-asymptotic substitution and has been tested extensively. This paper investigates the rate of convergence of this method. In particular, we show that the relative rate of convergence is of order <i>n</i>^2/7 if the locally cubic fitting is used in the pilot stage, and the rate of convergence is <i>n</i>^2/5 when the local polynomial of degree 5 is used in the pilot fitting. The study also reveals a marked difference between the bandwidth selection for nonparametric regression and that for density estimation: The plug-in approach for the latter case can admit the root-<i>n</i> rate of convergence while for the former case the best rate is of order <i>n</i>^2/5.

Discrepancy is a kind of important measure used in experimental design. Recently, a so-called discrete discrepancy has been applied to evaluate the uniformity of factorial designs. In this paper, we review some recent advances on application of the discrete discrepancy to several common experimental designs and summarize some important results.