Both seasonal unit roots and periodic variation can be prevalent in seasonal data. When testing seasonal unit roots under periodic variation, the validity of the existing methods, such as the HEGY test, remains unknown. This paper analyzes the behavior of the augmented HEGY test and the unaugmented HEGY test under periodic variation. It turns out that the asymptotic null distributions of the HEGY statistics testing the single roots at $1$ or $-1$ when there is periodic variation are identical to the asymptotic null distributions when there is no periodic variation. On the other hand, the asymptotic null distributions of the statistics testing any coexistence of roots at $1$, $-1$, $i$, or $-i$ when there is periodic variation are non-standard and are different from the asymptotic null distributions when there is no periodic variation. Therefore, when periodic variation exists, HEGY tests are not directly applicable to the joint tests for any concurrence of seasonal unit roots. As a remedy, bootstrap is proposed; in particular, the augmented HEGY test with seasonal independent and identically distributed (iid) bootstrap and the unaugmented HEGY test with seasonal block bootstrap are implemented. The consistency of these bootstrap procedures is established. The finite-sample behavior of these bootstrap tests is illustrated via simulation and prevails over their competitors'. Finally, these bootstrap tests are applied to detect the seasonal unit roots in various economic time series.
One of the most widely applied unit root test, Phillips-Perron test, enjoys in general highpowers, but suffers from size distortions when moving average noise exists. As a remedy, thispaper proposes a nonparametric bootstrap unit root test that specifically targets moving aver-age noise. Via a bootstrap functional central limit theorem, the consistency of this bootstrapapproach is established under general assumptions which allows a large family of non-linear timeseries. In simulation, this bootstrap test alleviates the size distortions of the Phillips-Perrontest while preserving its high powe…
This paper considers the regional estimation of high quantiles of annual maximal river flow distributions $F$, an important problem from flood frequency analysis. Even though this particular problem has been addressed by many papers, less attention has been payed to incorporating seasonal variability and spatial dependence into the methods. We are going to discuss two regional estimators of high quantiles of local distributions $F$ that are able to deal with these important features, namely, a parametric approach based on so-called two-component extreme value distributions and a semi-parametri…
In the extreme value analysis of time series, not only the tail behavior is of interest, but also the serial dependence plays a crucial role. Drees and Rootzén (2010) established limit theorems for a general class of empirical processes of so-called cluster functionals which can be used to analyse various aspects of the extreme value behavior of mixing time series. However, usually the limit distribution is too complex to enable a direct construction of confidence regions. Therefore, we suggest a multiplier block bootstrap analog to the empirical processes of cluster functionals. It is shown t…
Inference about a scalar parameter of interest typically relies on the asymptotic normality of common likelihood pivots, such as the signed likelihood root, the score and Wald statistics. Nevertheless, the resulting inferential procedures are known to perform poorly when the dimension of the nuisance parameter is large relative to the sample size and when the information about the parameters is limited. In many such cases, the use of asymptotic normality of analytical modifications of the signed likelihood root is known to recover inferential performance. It is proved here that parametric boot…
Ethane is the most abundant non-methane hydrocarbon in the Earth's atmosphere and an important precursor of tropospheric ozone through various chemical pathways. Ethane is also an indirect greenhouse gas (global warming potential), influencing the atmospheric lifetime of methane through the consumption of the hydroxyl radical (OH). Understanding the development of trends and identifying trend reversals in atmospheric ethane is therefore crucial. Our dataset consists of four series of daily ethane columns obtained from ground-based FTIR measurements. As many other decadal time series, our data …
This paper provides conditions under which subsampling and the bootstrap can be used to construct estimators of the quantiles of the distribution of a root that behave well uniformly over a large class of distributions $\mathbf{P}$. These results are then applied (i) to construct confidence regions that behave well uniformly over $\mathbf{P}$ in the sense that the coverage probability tends to at least the nominal level uniformly over $\mathbf{P}$ and (ii) to construct tests that behave well uniformly over $\mathbf{P}$ in the sense that the size tends to no greater than the nominal level unifo…
Consider $M$-estimation in a semiparametric model that is characterized by a Euclidean parameter of interest and an infinite-dimensional nuisance parameter. As a general purpose approach to statistical inferences, the bootstrap has found wide applications in semiparametric $M$-estimation and, because of its simplicity, provides an attractive alternative to the inference approach based on the asymptotic distribution theory. The purpose of this paper is to provide theoretical justifications for the use of bootstrap as a semiparametric inferential tool. We show that, under general conditions, the…
Online Inference in Distributional Temporal-Difference Learning
Yau Mathematical Sciences Center, Tsinghua University（清华大学丘成桐数学科学中心）；School of Statistics and Data Science, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics（上海财经大学统计与数据科学学院）
This paper is concerned with inference in threshold regression models when the practitioners do not know whether at the threshold point the true specification has a kink or a jump. We nest previous works that assume either continuity or discontinuity at the threshold point and develop robust inference methods on the parameters of the model, which are valid under both specifications. In particular, we found that the parameter values under the kink restriction are irregular points of the Hessian matrix of the expected Gaussian quasi-likelihood. This irregularity destroys the asymptotic normality…
This paper proposes a valid bootstrap-based distributional approximation for M-estimators exhibiting a Chernoff (1964)-type limiting distribution. For estimators of this kind, the standard nonparametric bootstrap is inconsistent. The method proposed herein is based on the nonparametric bootstrap, but restores consistency by altering the shape of the criterion function defining the estimator whose distribution we seek to approximate. This modification leads to a generic and easy-to-implement resampling method for inference that is conceptually distinct from other available distributional approx…
In this paper, we propose a new test for the equality of several covariance functions for functional data. Its test statistic is taken as the supremum value of the sum of the squared differences between the estimated individual covariance functions and the pooled sample covariance function, hoping to obtain a more powerful test than some existing tests for the same testing problem. The asymptotic random expression of this test statistic under the null hypothesis is obtained. To approximate the null distribution of the proposed test statistic, we describe a parametric bootstrap method and a non…
We consider marked empirical processes indexed by a randomly projected functional covariate to construct goodness-of-fit tests for the functional linear model with scalar response. The test statistics are built from continuous functionals over the projected process, resulting in computationally efficient tests that exhibit root-n convergence rates and circumvent the curse of dimensionality. The weak convergence of the empirical process is obtained conditionally on a random direction, whilst the almost surely equivalence between the testing for significance expressed on the original and on the …
The infinite-dimensional Hilbert sphere $S^\infty$ has been widely employed to model density functions and shapes, extending the finite-dimensional counterpart. We consider the Fréchet mean as an intrinsic summary of the central tendency of data lying on $S^\infty$. To break a path for sound statistical inference, we derive properties of the Fréchet mean on $S^\infty$ by establishing its existence and uniqueness as well as a root-$n$ central limit theorem (CLT) for the sample version, overcoming obstructions from infinite-dimensionality and lack of compactness on $S^\infty$. Intrinsic CLTs for…
An important statistical inference problem in sequential analysis is the construction of confidence intervals following sequential tests, to which Michael Woodroofe has made fundamental contributions. This paper reviews Woodroofe's method and other approaches in the literature. In particular it shows how a bias-corrected pivot originally introduced by Woodroofe can be used as an improved root for sequential bootstrap confidence intervals.
When estimating a Global Average Treatment Effect (GATE) under network interference, units can have widely different relationships to the treatment depending on a combination of the structure of their network neighborhood, the structure of the interference mechanism, and how the treatment was distributed in their neighborhood. In this work, we introduce a sequential procedure to generate and select graph- and treatment-based covariates for GATE estimation under regression adjustment. We show that it is possible to simultaneously achieve low bias and considerably reduce variance with such a pro…
This paper considers the problem of testing if a sequence of means $(μ_t)_{t =1,\ldots ,n }$ of a non-stationary time series $(X_t)_{t =1,\ldots ,n }$ is stable in the sense that the difference of the means $μ_1$ and $μ_t$ between the initial time $t=1$ and any other time is smaller than a given level, that is $ | μ_1 - μ_t | \leq c $ for all $t =1,\ldots ,n $. A test for hypotheses of this type is developed using a biascorrected monotone rearranged local linear estimator and asymptotic normality of the corresponding test statistic is established. As the asymptotic variance depends on the loca…
We present a new test when there is a nuisance parameter under the alternative hypothesis. The test exploits the p-value occupation time [PVOT], the measure of the nuisance parameter subset on which a p-value test based on a a test statistic rejects the null hypothesis. Key contributions are: (i) An asymptotic critical value upper bound for our test is the significance level α, making inference easy. (ii) We only require the test statistic to have a known or bootstrappable limit distribution, hence we do not require root(n)-Gaussian asymptotics, allowing for weak or non-identification, boundar…
