Varying coefficient models are a useful extension of classical linear models. They arise naturally when one wishes to examine how regression coefficients change over different groups characterized by certain covariates such as age. The appeal of these models is that the coef. cient functions can easily be estimated via a simple local regression. This yields a simple one-step estimation procedure. We show that such a one-step method cannot be optimal when different coefficient functions admit different degrees of smoothness. This drawback can be repaired by using our proposed two-step estimation procedure. The asymptotic mean-squared error for the two-step procedure is obtained and is shown to achieve the optimal rate of convergence. A few simulation studies show that the gain by the two-step procedure can be quite substantial. The methodology is illustrated by an application to an environmental data set.

In the analysis of cluster data the regression coefficients are frequently assumed to be the same across all clusters. This hampers the ability to study the varying impacts of factors on each cluster. In this paper, a semiparametric model is introduced to account for varying impacts of factors over clusters by using cluster-level covariates. It achieves the parsimony of parametrization and allows the explorations of nonlinear interactions. The random effect in the semiparametric model accounts also for within cluster correlation. Local linear based estimation procedure is proposed for estimating functional coefficients, residual variance, and within cluster correlation matrix. The asymptotic properties of the proposed estimators are established and the method for constructing simultaneous confidence bands are proposed and studied. In addition, relevant hypothesis testing problems are addressed. Simulation studies are

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Several new tests are proposed for examining the adequacy of a family of parametric models against large nonparametric alternatives. These tests formally check if the bias vector of residuals from parametric fits is negligible by using the adaptive Neyman test and other methods. The testing procedures formalize the traditional model diagnostic tools based on residual plots. We examine the rates of contiguous alternatives that can be detected consistently by the adaptive Neyman test. Applications of the procedures to the partially linear models are thoroughly discussed. Our simulation studies show that the new testing procedures are indeed powerful and omnibus. The power of the proposed tests is comparable to the <i>F</i>-test statistic even in the situations where the <i>F</i> test is known to be suitable and can be far more powerful than the <i>F</i>-test statistic in other situations. An application to testing linear models versus

Large-scale multiple testing with correlated and heavy-tailed data arises in a wide range of research areas from genomics, medical imaging to finance. Conventional methods for estimating the false discovery proportion (FDP) often ignore the effect of heavy-tailedness and the dependence structure among test statistics, and thus may lead to inefficient or even inconsistent estimation. Also, the commonly imposed joint normality assumption is arguably too stringent for many applications. To address these challenges, in this article we propose a factor-adjusted robust multiple testing (FarmTest) procedure for large-scale simultaneous inference with control of the FDP. We demonstrate that robust factor adjustments are extremely important in both controlling the FDP and improving the power. We identify general conditions under which the proposed method produces consistent estimate of the FDP. As a byproduct that is