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The present paper studies density deconvolution in the presence of small Berkson errors, in particular, when the variances of the errors tend to zero as the sample size grows. It is known that when the Berkson errors are present, in some cases, the unknown density estimator can be obtained by simple averaging without using kernels. However, this may not be the case when Berkson errors are asymptotically small. By treating the former case as a kernel estimator with the zero bandwidth, we obtain the optimal expressions for the bandwidth.We show that the density of Berkson errors acts as a regularizer, so that the kernel estimator is unnecessary when the variance of Berkson errors lies above some threshold that depends on the shapes of the densities in the model and the number of observations.
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Smoothness-Penalized Deconvolution (SPeD) of a Density Estimate
This paper addresses the deconvolution problem of estimating a square-integrable probability density from observations contaminated with additive measurement errors having a known density. The estimator begins with a density estimate of the contaminated observations and minimizes a reconstruction error penalized by an integrated squared m-th derivative. Theory for deconvolution has mainly focused on kernel- or wavelet-based techniques, but other methods including spline-based techniques and this smoothnesspenalized estimator have been found to outperform kernel methods in simulation studies. This paper fills in some of these gaps by establishing asymptotic guarantees for the smoothness-penalized approach. Consistency is established in mean integrated squared error, and rates of convergence are derived for Gaussian, Cauchy, and Laplace error densities, attaining some lower bounds already in the literature. The assumptions are weak for most results; the estimator can be used with a broader class of error densities than the deconvoluting kernel. Our application example estimates the density of the mean cytotoxicity of certain bacterial isolates under random sampling; this mean cytotoxicity can only be measured experimentally with additive error, leading to the deconvolution problem. We also describe a method for approximating the solution by a cubic spline, which reduces to a quadratic program.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1814840
- PAR ID:
- 10470132
- Publisher / Repository:
- Taylor &ill-posed problem, measurement error, density estimation, regularization Francis Online
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of the American Statistical Association
- ISSN:
- 0162-1459
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 25
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- ill-posed problem measurement error density estimation regularization
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1080/01621459.2023.2259028
