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Duke Economics Working Paper #00-10

Cross Validated SNP Density Estimates

Mark Coppejans and A. Ronald Gallant

Abstract

We consider cross-validation strategies for the SNP nonparametric density estimator, which is a truncation (or sieve) estimator based upon a Hermite series expansion. Our main focus is on the use of SNP density estimators as an adjunct to EMM structural estimation. It is known that for this purpose a desirable truncation point occurs at the last point at which the MSE curve of the SNP density estimate declines abruptly. We study the determination of the MSE curve on a per sample basis for iid data by means of leave-one-out cross-validation and hold-out-sample cross-validation through an examination of their performance over the Marron-Wand test suite and models related to asset pricing and auction applications. We find that both methods are informative as to the location of abrupt drops. The hold-out-sample method is cheaper to compute because it requires fewer nonlinear optimizations. The minimum of the hold-out-sample cross-validation curve also seems to be a better indicator of the minimum of the true MSE curve. We consider the asymptotic justification of hold-out-sample cross-validation. For this purpose, we establish rates of convergence of the SNP estimator under the Hellinger norm that are of interest in their own right.

Published in Journal of Econometrics, Vol. 110, No. 1, September, 2002, pp. 27-65.