Nonparametric estimation in a regression model with additive and multiplicative noise

In this paper, we consider an unknown functional estimation problem in a general nonparametric regression model with the feature of having both multiplicative and additive noise.We propose two new wavelet estimators in this general context. We prove that they achieve fast convergence rates under the mean integrated square error over Besov spaces. The obtained rates have the particularity of being established under weak conditions on the model. A numerical study in a context comparable to stochastic frontier estimation (with the difference that the boundary is not necessarily a production function) supports the theory

Investigating swimming technical skills by a double partition clustering of multivariate functional data allowing for dimension selection

Investigating technical skills of swimmers is a challenge for performance improvement, that can be achieved by analyzing multivariate functional data recorded by Inertial Measurement Units (IMU). To investigate technical levels of front-crawl swimmers, a new model-based approach is introduced to obtain two complementary partitions reflecting, for each swimmer, its swimming pattern and its ability to reproduce it. Contrary to the usual approaches for functional data clustering, the proposed approach also considers the information of the residuals resulting from the functional basis decomposition. Indeed, after decomposing into functional basis both the original signal (measuring the swimming pattern) and the signal of squared residuals (measuring the ability to reproduce the swimming pattern), the method fits the joint distribution of the coefficients related to both decompositions by considering dependency between both partitions. Modeling this dependency is mandatory since the difficulty of reproducing a swimming pattern depends on its shape. Moreover, a sparse decomposition of the distribution within components that permits a selection of the relevant dimensions during clustering is proposed. The partitions obtained on the IMU data aggregate the kinematical stroke variability linked to swimming technical skills and allow relevant biomechanical strategy for front-crawl sprint performance to be identified

Estimation of the Order of Non-Parametric Hidden Markov Models using the Singular Values of an Integral Operator

We are interested in assessing the order of a finite-state Hidden Markov Model (HMM) with the only two assumptions that the transition matrix of the latent Markov chain has full rank and that the density functions of the emission distributions are linearly independent. We introduce a new procedure for estimating this order by investigating the rank of some well-chosen integral operator which relies on the distribution of a pair of consecutive observations. This method circumvents the usual limits of the spectral method when it is used for estimating the order of an HMM: it avoids the choice of the basis functions; it does not require any knowledge of an upper-bound on the order of the HMM (for the spectral method, such an upper-bound is defined by the number of basis functions); it permits to easily handle different types of data (including continuous data, circular data or multivariate continuous data) with a suitable choice of kernel. The method relies on the fact that the order of the HMM can be identified from the distribution of a pair of consecutive observations and that this order is equal to the rank of some integral operator (\emph{i.e.} the number of its singular values that are non-zero). Since only the empirical counter-part of the singular values of the operator can be obtained, we propose a data-driven thresholding procedure. An upper-bound on the probability of overestimating the order of the HMM is established. Moreover, sufficient conditions on the bandwidth used for kernel density estimation and on the threshold are stated to obtain the consistency of the estimator of the order of the HMM. The procedure is easily implemented since the values of all the tuning parameters are determined by the sample size

Semaine d'Etude Mathématiques et Entreprises 1 : Géométrie des matrices de covariance pour le traitement de signaux radars

Les radars Doppler permettent de détecter des objets volants petits ou de faible signature radar. Thalès propose ici de réfléchir aux techniques permettant de faire ressortir de la masse des données radar celles qui sont "aberrantes" afin de repérer parmi le bruit de fond dû aux milieux environnants (nuages de pluie,...) la trace d'un objet volant

Parametric estimation of hidden stochastic model by contrast minimization and deconvolution: application to the Stochastic Volatility Model

We study a new parametric approach for particular hidden stochastic models such as the Stochastic Volatility model. This method is based on contrast minimization and deconvolution. After proving consistency and asymptotic normality of the estimation leading to asymptotic confidence intervals, we provide a thorough numerical study, which compares most of the classical methods that are used in practice (Quasi Maximum Likelihood estimator, Simulated Expectation Maximization Likelihood estimator and Bayesian estimators). We prove that our estimator clearly outperforms the Maximum Likelihood Estimator in term of computing time, but also most of the other methods. We also show that this contrast method is the most robust with respect to non Gaussianity of the error and also does not need any tuning parameter.

Analysis, detection and correction of misspecified discrete time state space models

Misspecifications (i.e. errors on the parameters) of state space models lead to incorrect inference of the hidden states. This paper studies weakly nonlin-ear state space models with additive Gaussian noises and proposes a method for detecting and correcting misspecifications. The latter induce a biased estimator of the hidden state but also happen to induce correlation on innovations and other residues. This property is used to find a well-defined objective function for which an optimisation routine is applied to recover the true parameters of the model. It is argued that this method can consistently estimate the bias on the parameter. We demonstrate the algorithm on various models of increasing complexity

Contrast estimation for noisy observations of diffusion processes via closed-form density expansions

International audienceWhen a continuous-time diffusion is observed only at discrete times with measurement noise, in most cases the transition density is not known and the likelihood is in the form of a high-dimensional integral that does not have a closed-form solution and is difficult to compute accurately. Using Hermite expansions and deconvolution strategy, we provide a general explicit sequence of closed-form contrast for noisy and discretely observed diffusion processes. This work allows the estimation of many diffusion processes. We show that the approximation is very accurate and prove that minimizing the sequence results in a consistent and asymptotically normal estimator. Monte Carlo evidence for the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process reveals that this method works well and outperforms the Euler expansion of the transition density in situations relevant for financial models