Bernstein Polynomial Model for Grouped Continuous Data

Abstract

Grouped data are commonly encountered in applications. The Bernstein polynomial model is proposed as an approximate model in this paper for estimating a univariate density function based on grouped data. The coefficients of the Bernstein polynomial, as the mixture proportions of beta distributions, can be estimated using an EM algorithm. The optimal degree of the Bernstein polynomial can be determined using a change-point estimation method. The rate of convergence of the proposed density estimate to the true density is proved to be almost parametric by an acceptance-rejection arguments used in Monte Carlo method. The proposed method is compared with some existing methods in a simulation study and is applied to a real dataset.