Estimation and bootstrap with censored data in fixed design nonparametric regression

Abstract

We study Beran's extension of the Kaplan-Meier estimator for thesituation of right censored observations at fixed covariate values. Thisestimator for the conditional distribution function at a given value of thecovariate involves smoothing with Gasser-Müller weights. We establishan almost sure asymptotic representation which provides a key tool forobtaining central limit results. To avoid complicated estimation ofasymptotic bias and variance parameters, we propose a resampling methodwhich takes the covariate information into account. An asymptoticrepresentation for the bootstrapped estimator is proved and the strongconsistency of the bootstrap approximation to the conditional distributionfunction is obtained.