Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2013 iii Paper 33 2 Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-07
For the unit-width box kernel, the convolution and kernel density estimator areandIn particular . The scaling gives . Even if is not square-integrable, Young's convolution inequality gives because and .
Using independence to eliminate the cross terms in the centred estimator, and Tonelli theorem to integrate the nonnegative variance, gives the exact integrated variance of a kernel density estimator:The Cauchy-Schwarz inequality now yieldsThis constant comes from the unit norm of the unscaled unit-width box kernel.
For the piecewise constant probability density function, integrability forces the constants on both unbounded outer intervals to be zero. Thus is bounded, has compact support, and has finitely many jumps. Let denote the jump at . For smaller than the least gap between consecutive breakpoints, the smoothing regions do not overlap. Outside these regions the convolution equals .
Within a region, put . For , the bias is ; for , it is . Endpoint values do not affect an norm. Integrating these two triangular errors givesThis is the box-kernel bias of a piecewise constant density. By the triangle inequality, with ,Balancing this bias-variance tradeoff with gives, for all sufficiently large ,