In this article, we propose a new nonparametric data analysis tool, which we call nonparametric modal regression, to investigate the relationship among interested variables based on estimating the mode of the conditional density of a response variable Y given predictors X. The nonparametric modal regression is distinguished from the conventional nonparametric regression in that, instead of the conditional average or median, it uses the "most likely" conditional values to measures the center. Better prediction performance and robustness are two important characteristics of nonparametric modal regression compared to traditional nonparametric mean regression and nonparametric median regression. We propose to use local polynomial regression to estimate the nonparametric modal regression. The asymptotic properties of the resulting estimator are investigated. To broaden the applicability of the nonparametric modal regression to high dimensional data or functional/longitudinal data, we further develop a nonparametric varying coefficient modal regression. A Monte Carlo simulation study and an analysis of health care expenditure data demonstrate some superior performance of the proposed nonparametric modal regression model to the traditional nonparametric mean regression and nonparametric median regression in terms of the prediction performance.

In this article, we propose a class of semiparametric mixture regression models with single-index. We argue that many recently proposed semiparametric/nonparametric mixture regression models can be considered special cases of the proposed model. However, unlike existing semiparametric mixture regression models, the new pro- posed model can easily incorporate multivariate predictors into the nonparametric components. Backfitting estimates and the corresponding algorithms have been proposed for to achieve the optimal convergence rate for both the parameters and the nonparametric functions. We show that nonparametric functions can be esti- mated with the same asymptotic accuracy as if the parameters were known and the index parameters can be estimated with the traditional parametric root n convergence rate. Simulation studies and an application of NBA data have been conducted to demonstrate the finite sample performance of the proposed models.

Mixtures of factor analyzers (MFAs) have been popularly used to cluster the high-dimensional data. However, the traditional estimation method is based on the normality assumptions of random terms and thus is sensitive to outliers. In this article, we introduce a robust estimation procedure of MFAs using the trimmed likelihood estimator. We use a simulation study and a real data application to demonstrate the robustness of the trimmed estimation procedure and compare it with the traditional normality-based maximum likelihood estimate.

In this paper, we investigate a robust estimation of the number of components in the mixture of regression models using trimmed information criteria. Compared to the traditional information criteria, the trimmed criteria are robust and not sensitive to outliers. The superiority of the trimmed methods in comparison with the traditional information criterion methods is illustrated through a simulation study. Two real data applications are also used to illustrate the effectiveness of the trimmed model selection methods.