A piecewise-deterministic Markov process is a stochastic process whose
behavior is governed by an ordinary differential equation punctuated by random
jumps occurring at random times. We focus on the nonparametric estimation
problem of the jump rate for such a stochastic model observed within a long
time interval under an ergodicity condition. We introduce an uncountable class
(indexed by the deterministic flow) of recursive kernel estimates of the jump
rate and we establish their strong pointwise consistency as well as their
asymptotic normality. We propose to choose among this class the estimator with
the minimal variance, which is unfortunately unknown and thus remains to be
estimated. We also discuss the choice of the bandwidth parameters by
cross-validation methods.Comment: 36 pages, 18 figure