For an equally spaced design with independent errors of variance at most and a regression function with Lipschitz constant , the unit-width box kernel estimator averages the observations in the window. Its bias is at most , and its variance is at most . The window occupancy for an equally spaced regression design gives, whenever ,
In the usual range , this is uniformly up to the boundary. For arbitrarily large bandwidth, the stochastic error cannot continue to decrease as : once all observations are included the estimator is simply their mean.
For the unit-width box kernel, the order-zero local polynomial estimator minimizes, over constants ,
A common factor such as in these weights does not change the minimizer. Put and . If , differentiating the quadratic gives its unique minimizer:
The last expression is the Nadaraya–Watson estimator. Every is within of some design point . Since gives , that point is in the closed kernel window. Thus and the equality holds throughout the domain, including and .
For the error bound, first take the usual bandwidth range . The clipped window has length at least . Any closed interval of length in contains at least points of the design . Consequently
where the last inequality uses . This is a window occupancy for an equally spaced regression design bound that remains valid at the boundary.
Let , the Lipschitz constant supplied by the bounded-derivative assumption. The bias is bounded by
Independence and the variance bound give
By the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality and the triangle inequality,
Thus works uniformly in and the design size in this bandwidth range. The same clipped-length proof in fact works for .
There is a genuine omission in the unrestricted formulation: an upper restriction on bandwidth is necessary for the displayed variance scale. Take , , and . The window contains the sole observation for every , and holds. Its mean absolute error is , whereas the proposed variance term is . No fixed can satisfy this for unbounded .
A valid statement for every satisfying uses . The clipped window has length at least , so , while the preceding coverage argument gives . If , the first bound gives ; if , the second does. Therefore the same bias and variance calculation proves the unrestricted correction
This mean absolute error of local constant regression bound reduces to the requested rate for ordinary small bandwidths and saturates its stochastic term when the window covers the whole design.