A note on nonparametric density deconvolution by weighted kernel estimators

Recently Hazelton and Turlach (2009) proposed a weighted kernel density estimator for the deconvolution problem. In the case of Gaussian kernels and measurement error, they argued that the weighted kernel density estimator is a competitive estimator over the classical deconvolution kernel estimator. In this paper we consider weighted kernel density estimators when sample observations are contaminated by double exponentially distributed errors. The performance of the weighted kernel density estimators is compared over the classical deconvolution kernel estimator and the kernel density estimator based on the support vector regression method by means of a simulation study. The weighted density estimator with the Gaussian kernel shows numerical instability in practical implementation of optimization function. However the weighted density estimates with the double exponential kernel has very similar patterns to the classical kernel density estimates in the simulations, but the shape is less satisfactory than the classical kernel density estimator with the Gaussian kernel.