$M$-estimation and deconvolution in a diffusion model with application to biosensor transdermal blood alcohol monitoring

Abstract

We develop $M$-estimation and deconvolution methodology with the goal of making well-founded statistical inference on an individual's blood alcohol level based on noisy measurements of their skin alcohol content. We first apply our results to a nonlinear least squares estimator of the key parameter that specifies the blood/skin alcohol relation in a diffusion model, and establish its existence, consistency, and asymptotic normality. To make inference on the unknown underlying blood alchohol curve, we develop a basis space deconvolution approach with regulazation, and determine the asymptotic distribution of the error process, thus allowing us to compute uniform confidence bands on the curve. Simulation studies show agreement between the performance of our curve estimators and their asymptotic distributions at low noise levels, and we apply our methods to a real skin alcohol data set collected via a transdermal biosensor.