Penalized maximum likelihood estimation with symmetric log-concave errors and LASSO penalty

Abstract

Penalized least squares methods are important tools to simultaneously select variables and estimate parameters in linear regression. The penalized maximum likelihood can also be used for the same purpose assuming that the error distribution falls in a certain parametric family of distributions. However, the use of a certain parametric family can suffer a misspecification problem which undermines the estimation accuracy. To give sufficient flexibility to the error distribution, we propose to use the symmetric log-concave error distribution with LASSO penalty. A feasible algorithm to estimate both nonparametric and parametric components in the proposed model is provided. Some numerical studies are also presented showing that the proposed method produces more efficient estimators than some existing methods with similar variable selection performance.