Estimation with Numerical Integration on Sparse Grids

For the estimation of many econometric models, integrals without analytical solutions have to be evaluated. Examples include limited dependent variables and nonlinear panel data models. In the case of one-dimensional integrals, Gaussian quadrature is known to work efficiently for a large class of problems. In higher dimensions, similar approaches discussed in the literature are either very specific and hard to implement or suffer from exponentially rising computational costs in the number of dimensions - a problem known as the "curse of dimensionality" of numerical integration. We propose a strategy that shares the advantages of Gaussian quadrature methods, is very general and easily implemented, and does not suffer from the curse of dimensionality. Monte Carlo experiments for the random parameters logit model indicate the superior performance of the proposed method over simulation techniques

Sparse Quadrature for High-Dimensional Integration with Gaussian Measure

In this work we analyze the dimension-independent convergence property of an abstract sparse quadrature scheme for numerical integration of functions of high-dimensional parameters with Gaussian measure. Under certain assumptions of the exactness and the boundedness of univariate quadrature rules as well as the regularity of the parametric functions with respect to the parameters, we obtain the convergence rate $O(N^{-s})$, where $N$ is the number of indices, and $s$ is independent of the number of the parameter dimensions. Moreover, we propose both an a-priori and an a-posteriori schemes for the construction of a practical sparse quadrature rule and perform numerical experiments to demonstrate their dimension-independent convergence rates

Estimation with Numerical Integration on Sparse Grids

For the estimation of many econometric models, integrals without analytical solutions have to be evaluated. Examples include limited dependent variables and nonlinear panel data models. In the case of one-dimensional integrals, Gaussian quadrature is known to work efficiently for a large class of problems. In higher dimensions, similar approaches discussed in the literature are either very specific and hard to implement or suffer from exponentially rising computational costs in the number of dimensions - a problem known as the "curse of dimensionality" of numerical integration. We propose a strategy that shares the advantages of Gaussian quadrature methods, is very general and easily implemented, and does not suffer from the curse of dimensionality. Monte Carlo experiments for the random parameters logit model indicate the superior performance of the proposed method over simulation techniques.Estimation; Quadrature; Simulation; Mixed Logit