English

Nonparametric estimation of conditional densities by generalized random forests

Econometrics 2025-03-19 v4

Abstract

Considering a continuous random variable Y together with a continuous random vector X, I propose a nonparametric estimator f^(.|x) for the conditional density of Y given X=x. This estimator takes the form of an exponential series whose coefficients Tx = (Tx1,...,TxJ) are the solution of a system of nonlinear equations that depends on an estimator of the conditional expectation E[p(Y)|X=x], where p is a J-dimensional vector of basis functions. The distinguishing feature of the proposed estimator is that E[p(Y)|X=x] is estimated by generalized random forest (Athey, Tibshirani, and Wager, Annals of Statistics, 2019), targeting the heterogeneity of Tx across x. I show that f^(.|x) is uniformly consistent and asymptotically normal, allowing J to grow to infinity. I also provide a standard error formula to construct asymptotically valid confidence intervals. Results from Monte Carlo experiments are provided.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2309.13251,
  title  = {Nonparametric estimation of conditional densities by generalized random forests},
  author = {Federico Zincenko},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.13251},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:30:10.165Z