The availability of high-frequency intraday data allows us to accurately estimate stock volatility. This paper employs a bivariate diffusion to model the price and volatility of an asset and investigates kernel type estimators of spot volatility based on high-frequency return data. We establish both pointwise and global asymptotic distributions for the estimators.

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The effect of errors in variables in nonparametric regression estimation is examined. To account for errors in covariates, deconvolution is involved in the construction of a new class of kernel estimators. It is shown that optimal local and global rates of convergence of these kernel estimators can be characterized by the tail behavior of the characteristic function of the error distribution. In fact, there are two types of rates of convergence according to whether the error is ordinary smooth or super smooth. It is also shown that these results hold uniformly over a class of joint distributions of the response and the covariate, which is rich enough for many practical applications. Furthermore, to achieve optimality, we show that the convergence rates of all possible estimators have a lower bound possessed by the kernel estimators.

A variable screening procedure via correlation learning was proposed by Fan and Lv (2008) to reduce dimensionality in sparse ultra-high-dimensional models. Even when the true model is linear, the marginal regression can be highly nonlinear. To address this issue, we further extend the correlation learning to marginal nonparametric learning. Our nonparametric independence screening (NIS) is a specific type of sure independence screening. We propose several closely related variable screening procedures. We show that with general nonparametric models, under some mild technical conditions, the proposed independence screening methods have a sure screening property. The extent to which the dimensionality can be reduced by independence screening is also explicitly quantified. As a methodological extension, we also propose a data-driven thresholding and an iterative nonparametric independence

Several large volatility matrix estimation procedures have been recently developed for factor-based It processes whose integrated volatility matrix consists of low-rank and sparse matrices. Their performance depends on the accuracy of input volatility matrix estimators. When estimating co-volatilities based on high-frequency data, one of the crucial challenges is non-synchronization for illiquid assets, which makes their co-volatility estimators inaccurate. In this paper, we study how to estimate the large integrated volatility matrix without using co-volatilities of illiquid assets. Specifically, we pretend that the co-volatilities for illiquid assets are missing, and estimate the low-rank matrix using a matrix completion scheme with a structured missing pattern. To further regularize the sparse volatility matrix, we employ the principal orthogonal complement thresholding method (POET). We also investigate the asymptotic