Title
A smooth nonparametric approach to determining cut-points of a continuous scale.
Abstract
The problem of determining cut-points of a continuous scale according to an established categorical scale is often encountered in practice for the purposes such as making diagnosis or treatment recommendation, determining study eligibility, or facilitating interpretations. A general analytic framework was recently proposed for assessing optimal cut-points defined based on some pre-specified criteria. However, the implementation of the existing nonparametric estimators under this framework and the associated inferences can be computationally intensive when more than a few cut-points need to be determined. To address this important issue, a smoothing-based modification of the current method is proposed and is found to substantially improve the computational speed as well as the asymptotic convergence rate. Moreover, a plug-in type variance estimation procedure is developed to further facilitate the computation. Extensive simulation studies confirm the theoretical results and demonstrate the computational benefits of the proposed method. The practical utility of the new approach is illustrated by an application to a mental health study.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1016/j.csda.2018.11.001
Computational Statistics & Data Analysis
Keywords
Field
DocType
Agreement,Association,Cut-point,Nonparametric,Smoothing objective function
Econometrics,Cut-point,Variance estimation,Categorical variable,Nonparametric statistics,Smoothing,Rate of convergence,Mathematics,Computation,Estimator
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
134
0167-9473
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
5
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zhiping Qiu100.34
Limin Peng222.42
Amita K Manatunga351.75
Ying Guo471.87