ROBUST TEST BASED ON NONLINEAR REGRESSION QUANTILE ESTIMATORS

In this paper we consider the problem of testing statistical hypotheses for unknown parameters in nonlinear regression models and propose three asymptotically equivalent tests based on regression quantiles estimators, which are Wald test, Lagrange Multiplier test and Likelihood Ratio test. We also derive the asymptotic distributions of the three test statistics both under the null hypotheses and under a sequence of local alternatives and verify that the asymptotic relative efficiency of the proposed test statistics with classical test based on least squares depends on the error distributions of the regression models. We give some examples to illustrate that the test based on the regression quantiles estimators performs better than the test based on the least squares estimators of the least absolute deviation estimators when the disturbance has asymmetric and heavy-tailed distribution.