Simultaneous inference for monotone and smoothly time-varying functions under complex temporal dynamics

Abstract: We propose a new framework for the simultaneous inference of monotone and smoothly time-varying functions under complex temporal dynamics utilizing the monotone rearrangement and the nonparametric estimation. We capitalize the Gaussian approximation for the nonparametric monotone estimator and construct the asymptotically correct simultaneous confidence bands (SCBs) by carefully designed bootstrap methods. We investigate two general and practical scenarios. The first is the simultaneous inference of monotone smooth trends from moderately high-dimensional time series, and the proposed algorithm has been employed for the joint inference of temperature curves from multiple areas. Specifically, most existing methods are designed for a single monotone smooth trend. In such cases, our proposed SCB empirically exhibits the narrowest width among existing approaches while maintaining confidence levels, and has been used for testing several hypotheses tailored to global warming. The second scenario involves simultaneous inference of monotone and smoothly time-varying regression coefficients in time-varying coefficient linear models. The proposed algorithm has been utilized for testing the impact of sunshine duration on temperature which is believed to be increasing by the increasingly severe greenhouse effect. The validity of the proposed methods has been justified in theory as well as by extensive simulations.