Student Paper Award of "Journal of nonparametric Statistics" for dr. Anneleen Verhasselt

The Section on Nonparametric Statistics of the American Statistical Association (ASA), has awarded to Dr Anneleen Verhasselt the first Journal of Nonparametric Statistics Student Paper Award for the paper Regularisation and P-splines in generalised linear models. Journal of Nonparametric Statistics, Volume 22 (2010), Issue 3, 271--295 (joint with I. Gijbels). This is the first time this price is awarded.

The paper will be freely available to read online for the remainder of 2011. Here you can find the announcement for the award.

Dr Verhasselt will present a talk at the 2011 Joint Statistical Meetings in Miami, Florida, USA, July 30-August 4. At the occasion of that international meeting the award will be presented to her.

Abstract

P-splines regression is a flexible smoothing tool in which the starting point is a highly parameterised model and overfitting is prevented by introducing a penalty function. A common form of the penalty term is obtained by taking a prespecified order of differences of adjacent coefficients. This paper deals with a data-driven choice of the differencing order, as such allowing for the fit to adapt automatically to the (unknown) degree of smoothness of the underlying function. The selection procedure is based on Akaike's information criterion. The study is carried out in a broad framework of generalised linear and generalised additive models. We provide the necessary theoretical support for the selection procedure, and investigate its performance via simulations. We illustrate the use of such a selection procedure on some real data examples. The discussed examples include generalised normal, binomial and Poisson regression models.