In this paper, we study, in some new ways, the estimation of unimodal densities. Several methods for estimating unimodal densities are proposed: plug-in MLE, pregrouping techniques, linear spline MLE. Based on the maximum likelihood method, an automatic procedure for estimating a unimodal density as well as its mode is proposed. We also give asymptotic theory for the proposed estimators. An important consequence of this study is that having to estimate the location of a mode does not affect the limiting behavior of the proposed unimodal density estimate. Simulation studies illustrate the proposed methods.

There are few techniques available for testing whether or not a family of parametric times series models fits a set of data reasonably well without serious restrictions on the forms of alternative models. In this paper, we consider generalised likelihood ratio tests of whether or not the spectral density function of a stationary time series admits certain parametric forms. We propose a bias correction method for the generalised likelihood ratio test of Fan et al. (2001). In particular, our methods can be applied to test whether or not a residual series is white noise. Sampling properties of the proposed tests are established. A bootstrap approach is proposed for estimating the null distribution of the test statistics. Simulation studies investigate the accuracy of the proposed bootstrap estimate and compare the power of the various ways of constructing the generalised likelihood ratio tests as well as some classic methods like

This paper introduces a Projected Principal Component Analysis (Projected-PCA), which employees principal component analysis to the projected (smoothed) data matrix onto a given linear space spanned by covariates. When it applies to high-dimensional factor analysis, the projection removes noise components. We show that the unobserved latent factors can be more accurately estimated than the conventional PCA if the projection is genuine, or more precisely, when the factor loading matrices are related to the projected linear space. When the dimensionality is large, the factors can be estimated accurately even when the sample size is finite. We propose a flexible semi-parametric factor model, which decomposes the factor loading matrix into the component that can be explained by subject-specific covariates and the orthogonal residual component. The covariates effects on the factor loadings are further

Generalized likelihood ratio statistics have been proposed in Fan, Zhang and Zhang [Ann. Statist. 29 (2001) 153193] as a generally applicable method for testing nonparametric hypotheses about nonparametric functions. The likelihood ratio statistics are constructed based on the assumption that the distributions of stochastic errors are in a certain parametric family. We extend their work to the case where the error distribution is completely unspecified via newly proposed sieve empirical likelihood ratio (SELR) tests. The approach is also applied to test conditional estimating equations on the distributions of stochastic errors. It is shown that the proposed SELR statistics follow asymptotically rescaled 2-distributions, with the scale constants and the degrees of freedom being independent of the nuisance parameters. This demonstrates that the Wilks phenomenon observed in Fan, Zhang and Zhang [Ann. Statist. 29

Variable selection in high-dimensional space characterizes many contemporary problems in scientific discovery and decision making. Many frequently-used techniques are based on independence screening; examples include correlation ranking (Fan and Lv, 2008) or feature selection using a two-sample t-test in high-dimensional classification (Tibshirani et al., 2003). Within the context of the linear model, Fan and Lv (2008) showed that this simple correlation ranking possesses a sure independence screening property under certain conditions and that its revision, called iteratively sure independent screening (ISIS), is needed when the features are marginally unrelated but jointly related to the response variable. In this paper, we extend ISIS, without explicit definition of residuals, to a general pseudo-likelihood framework, which includes generalized linear models as a special case. Even in the least-squares setting, the new method improves ISIS by allowing variable deletion in the iterative process. Our technique allows us to select important features in high-dimensional classification where the popularly used two-sample t-method fails. A new technique is introduced to reduce the false discovery rate in the feature screening stage. Several simulated and two real data examples are presented to illustrate the methodology.