Testing for homogeneity in mixture models

Jiaying Gu, Roger Koenker and Stanislav Volgushev

No 39/17, CeMMAP working papers from Institute for Fiscal Studies

Abstract: Statistical models of unobserved heterogeneity are typically formalized as mixtures of simple parametric models and interest naturally focuses on testing for homogeneity versus general mixture alternatives. Many tests of this type can be interpreted as C(α) tests, as in Neyman (1959), and shown to be locally, asymptotically optimal. These C(α) tests will be contrasted with a new approach to likelihood ratio testing for general mixture models. The latter tests are based on estimation of general nonparametric mixing distribution with the Kiefer and Wolfowitz (1956) maximum likelihood estimator. Recent developments in convex optimization have dramatically improved upon earlier EM methods for computation of these estimators, and recent results on the large sample behavior of likelihood ratios involving such estimators yield a tractable form of asymptotic inference. Improvement in computation efficiency also facilitates the use of a bootstrap method to determine critical values that are shown to work better than the asymptotic critical values in finite samples. Consistency of the bootstrap procedure is also formally established. We compare performance of the two approaches identifying circumstances in which each is preferred.This paper was published in Econometric Theory, 34, 850-95, (2018).

Date: 2017-08-10
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cemmap.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/CWP3917.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:azt:cemmap:39/17

DOI: 10.1920/wp.cem.2017.3917

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CeMMAP working papers from Institute for Fiscal Studies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dermot Watson ().