A kernel-based parametric method for conditional density estimation

  • Authors:
  • Gang Fu;Frank Y. Shih;Haimin Wang

  • Affiliations:
  • Perot Systems Government Services, Fairfax, VA 22031, USA;Computer Vision Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102, USA;Space Weather Research Laboratory, Department of Physics, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ 07102, USA

  • Venue:
  • Pattern Recognition
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

A conditional density function, which describes the relationship between response and explanatory variables, plays an important role in many analysis problems. In this paper, we propose a new kernel-based parametric method to estimate conditional density. An exponential function is employed to approximate the unknown density, and its parameters are computed from the given explanatory variable via a nonlinear mapping using kernel principal component analysis (KPCA). We develop a new kernel function, which is a variant to polynomial kernels, to be used in KPCA. The proposed method is compared with the Nadaraya-Watson estimator through numerical simulation and practical data. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the Nadaraya-Watson estimator in terms of revised mean integrated squared error (RMISE). Therefore, the proposed method is an effective method for estimating the conditional densities.