Ebook: Weak Convergence and Empirical Processes: With Applications to Statistics

This book tries to do three things. The first goal is to give an exposition of certain modes of stochastic convergence, in particular convergence in distribution. The classical theory of this subject was developed mostly in the 1950s and is well summarized in Billingsley (1968). During the last 15 years, the need for a more general theory allowing random elements that are not Borel measurable has become well established, particularly in developing the theory of empirical processes. Part 1 of the book, Stochastic Convergence, gives an exposition of such a theory following the ideas of J. Hoffmann-J!1Jrgensen and R. M. Dudley. A second goal is to use the weak convergence theory background devel­ oped in Part 1 to present an account of major components of the modern theory of empirical processes indexed by classes of sets and functions. The weak convergence theory developed in Part 1 is important for this, simply because the empirical processes studied in Part 2, Empirical Processes, are naturally viewed as taking values in nonseparable Banach spaces, even in the most elementary cases, and are typically not Borel measurable. Much of the theory presented in Part 2 has previously been scattered in the journal literature and has, as a result, been accessible only to a relatively small number of specialists. In view of the importance of this theory for statis­ tics, we hope that the presentation given here will make this theory more accessible to statisticians as well as to probabilists interested in statistical applications.

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This book provides an account of weak convergence theory and empirical processes and their applications to a wide variety of applications in statistics. The first part of the book presents a thorough account of stocastic convergence in its various forms. Part 2 brings together the theory of empirical processes in a form accessible to statisticians and probabilists. In Part 3, the authors cover a range of topics which demonstrate the applicability of the theory to important questions such as: limit theorems in asymptotic statistics; measures of goodness of fit; the bootstrap; and semiparametric estimation. Most of the sections conclude with ''problems and complements''. Some of these are exercises to help the reader's understanding of the material whereas others are intended to supplement the text.