Asymptotics for L2 functionals of the empirical quantile process, with applications to tests of fit based on weighted Wasserstein distances

Abstract

Weighted L₂ functionals of the empirical quantile process appear as a component of many test statistics, in particular in tests of fit to location-scale families of distributions based on weighted Wasserstein distances. An essentially complete set of distributional limit theorems for the squared empirical quantile process integrated with respect to general weights is presented. The results rely on limit theorems for quadratic forms in exponential random variables, and the proofs use only simple asymptotic theory for probability distributions in Rⁿ. The limit theorems are then applied to determine the asymptotic distribution of the test statistics on which weighted Wasserstein tests are based. In particular, this paper contains an elementary derivation of the limit distribution of the Shapiro-Wilk test statistic under normality.