When people in a society want to make inference about some parameter, each person may want to use data collected by other people. Information (data) exchange in social networks is usually costly, so to make reliable statistical decisions, people need to weigh the benefits and costs of information acquisition. Conflicts of interests and coordination problems will arise in the process. Classical statistics does not consider peoples incentives and interactions in the data-collection process. To address this imperfection, this work explores multi-agent Bayesian inference problems with a game theoretic social network model. Motivated by our interest in aggregate inference at the societal level, we propose a new concept, <i>finite population learning</i>, to address whether with high probability, a large fraction of people in a given finite population network can make good inference. Serving as a foundation, this concept enables

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We study the estimation of the additive components in additive regression models, based on the weighted sample average of regression surface, for stationary <i></i>-mixing processes. Explicit expression of this method makes possible a fast computation and allows an asymptotic analysis. The estimation procedure is especially useful for additive modeling. In this paper, it is shown that the average surface estimator shares the same optimality as the ideal estimator and has the same ability to estimate the additive component as the ideal case where other components are known. Formulas for the asymptotic bias and normality of the estimator are established. A small simulation study is carried out to illustrate the performance of the estimation and a real example is also used to demonstrate our methodology.

High-dimensional statistical tests often ignore correlations to gain simplicity and stability leading to null distributions that depend on functionals of correlation matrices such as their Frobenius norm and other r norms. Motivated by the computation of critical values of such tests, we investigate the difficulty of estimation the functionals of sparse correlation matrices. Specifically, we show that simple plug-in procedures based on thresholded estimators of correlation matrices are sparsity-adaptive and minimax optimal over a large class of correlation matrices. Akin to previous results on functional estimation, the minimax rates exhibit an elbow phenomenon. Our results are further illustrated in simulated data as well as an empirical study of data arising in financial econometrics.

When estimating a mean regression function and its derivatives, locally weighted least squares regression has proven to be a very attractive technique. The present paper focuses on the important issue of how to select the smoothing parameter or bandwidth. In the case of estimating curves with a complicated structure, a variable bandwidth is desirable. Furthermore, the bandwidth should be indicated by the data themselves. Recent developments in nonparametric smoothing techniques inspired us to propose such a datadriven bandwidth selection procedure, which can be used to select both constant and variable bandwidths. The idea is based on a residual squares criterion along with a good approximation of the bias and variance of the estimator. The procedure can be applied to select bandwidths not only for estimating the regression curve but also for estimating its derivatives. The resulting estimation