Empirical likelihood based testing for regression

Abstract

Consider a random vector (X,Y) and let m(x)=E(Y|X=x). We are interested in testing $H_{0}:m\in {\cal M}_{\Theta,{\cal G}}=\{\gamma(\cdot,\theta,g):\theta \in \Theta,g\in {\cal G}\}$ for some known function γ, some compact set $\Theta \subset I\!\!R^{p}$ and some function set ${\cal G}$ of real valued functions. Specific examples of this general hypothesis include testing for a parametric regression model, a generalized linear model, a partial linear model, a single index model, but also the selection of explanatory variables can be considered as a special case of this hypothesis.

To test this null hypothesis, we make use of the so-called marked empirical process introduced by [4] and studied by [16] for the particular case of parametric regression, in combination with the modern technique of empirical likelihood theory in order to obtain a powerful testing procedure. The asymptotic validity of the proposed test is established, and its finite sample performance is compared with other existing tests by means of a simulation study.