Local asymptotics of cross-validation in least-squares density estimation

Abstract: In model selection, several types of cross-validation are commonly used and many variants have been introduced. While consistency of some of these methods has been proven, their rate of convergence to the oracle is generally still unknown. Until now, an asymptotic analysis of crossvalidation able to answer this question has been lacking. Existing results focus on the ''pointwise'' estimation of the risk of a single estimator, whereas analysing model selection requires understanding how the CV risk varies with the model. In this article, we investigate the asymptotics of the CV risk in the neighbourhood of the optimal model, for trigonometric series estimators in density estimation. Asymptotically, simple validation and ''incomplete'' V --fold CV behave like the sum of a convex function fn and a symmetrized Brownian changed in time W gn/V. We argue that this is the right asymptotic framework for studying model selection.