Cross Validation for Kernel Density Estimation

In a post publihed in July, I mentioned the so called the Goldilocks principle, in the context of kermel density estimation, and bandwidth selection. The bandwith should not be too small (the variance would be too large) and it should not be too large (the bias would be too large). Another standard method to select the bandwith, as mentioned this afternoon in class is the cross-validation technique (described in Chiu (1991)). Here, we would like to minimize

https://latex.codecogs.com/gif.latex?\mathbb{E}\left[\int%20[\widehat{f}_h(x)-f(x)]^2dx\right]

The integral can be writen

https://latex.codecogs.com/gif.latex?\int%20\widehat{f}_h(x)^2dx-2\int%20\widehat{f}_h(x)f(x)dx+\int%20f(x)^2dx

Since the third component is constant, we have to minimize the expected value of the sum of the first two.

The idea is to approximate it as

https://latex.codecogs.com/gif.latex?J(h)=\int%20\widehat{f}_h(x)^2dx-\frac{2}{n}\sum_{i=1}^n%20\widehat{f}_{(-i)}(X_i)

which can easily be computed. Consider here some sample, with 50 observations, from a Gaussian distribution,

> set.seed(1)
> X=rnorm(50)

From Silverman’s rule of thumb (which should be appropriate here since the sample has a Gaussian sample) the optimal bandwidth is

> 1.06*sd(X)*length(X)^(-1/5)
[1] 0.4030127

Using the cross-validation technique mentioned above, compute

> J=function(h){
+ fhat=Vectorize(function(x) density(X,from=x,to=x,n=1,bw=h)$y)
+ fhati=Vectorize(function(i) density(X[-i],from=X[i],to=X[i],n=1,bw=h)$y)
+ F=fhati(1:length(X))
+ return(integrate(function(x) fhat(x)^2,-Inf,Inf)$value-2*mean(F))
+ }
> vx=seq(.1,1,by=.01)
> vy=Vectorize(J)(vx)
> df=data.frame(vx,vy)
> library(ggplot2)
> qplot(vx,vy,geom="line",data=df)

The function has the following shape

and the optimal value is

> optimize(J,interval=c(.1,1))
$minimum
[1] 0.4687553

$objective
[1] -0.3355477

Note that, indeed, it is close to Siverman’s optimal bandwidth.



Cite this blog post
Arthur Charpentier (2014, October 1). Cross Validation for Kernel Density Estimation. Freakonometrics. Retrieved March 19, 2024, from https://doi.org/10.58079/oux1

2 thoughts on “Cross Validation for Kernel Density Estimation”

  1. Thank you for your great post.
    When I ran your code it resulted in
    set.seed(20160705)
    n <- 100
    X <- rnorm(n)
    optimize(J,interval=c(.1,1))
    minimum
    [1] 0.5030485

    $objective
    [1] -0.2610623

    Is it plausible bandwidth?

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