Kernel-Type Estimators of Divergence Measures and Its Strong Uniform Consistency

Abstract

Nonparametric density estimation, based on kernel-type estimators, is a very popular method in statistical research, especially when we want to model the probabilistic or stochastic structure of a data set. In this paper, we investigate the asymptotic confidence bands for the distribution with kernel-estimators for some types of divergence measures (Renyi-α and Tsallis-α divergence). Our aim is to use the method based on empirical process techniques, in order to derive some asymptotic results. Under different assumptions, we establish a variety of fundamental and theoretical properties, such as the strong consistency of an uniform-in-bandwidth of the divergence estimators. We further apply the previous results in simulated examples, including the kernel-type estimator for Hellinger, Bhattacharyya and Kullback-Leibler divergence, to illustrate this approach, and we show that that the method performs competitively.