On Practical Efficiency of Locally Parametric Nonparametric Density Estimation Based on Local Likelihood Function

This paper offers a practical comparison of efficiency between local likelihood approach and conventional kernel approach in density estimation. The local likelihood estimation procedure maximizes a kernel smoothed log-likelihood function with respect to a polynomial approximation of the log likelihood function. We use two types of data driven bandwidths for each method and compare the mean integrated squares for several densities. Numerical results reveal that local log-linear approach with simple plug-in bandwidth shows better performance comparing to the standard kernel approach in heavy tailed distribution. For normal mixture density cases, standard kernel estimator with the bandwidth in Sheather and Jones(1991) dominates the others in moderately large sample size.