Smoothing Spline Density Estimation: Theory

In this article, a class of penalized likelihood probability density estimators is proposed and studied. The true log density is assumed to be a member of a reproducing kernel Hilbert space on a finite domain, not necessarily univariate, and the estimator is defined as the unique unconstrained minimizer of a penalized log likelihood functional in such a space. Under mild conditions, the existence of the estimator and the rate of convergence of the estimator in terms of the symmetrized Kullback-Leibler distance are established. To make the procedure applicable, a semiparametric approximation of the estimator is presented, which sits in an adaptive finite dimensional function space and hence can be computed in principle. The theory is developed in a generic setup and the proofs are largely elementary. Algorithms are yet to follow.