An Adversarial Approach to Structural Estimation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Kaji, Tetsuya, Manresa, Elena, Pouliot, Guillaume
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2020
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author Kaji, Tetsuya
Manresa, Elena
Pouliot, Guillaume
author_facet Kaji, Tetsuya
Manresa, Elena
Pouliot, Guillaume
contents We propose a new simulation-based estimation method, adversarial estimation, for structural models. The estimator is formulated as the solution to a minimax problem between a generator (which generates simulated observations using the structural model) and a discriminator (which classifies whether an observation is simulated). The discriminator maximizes the accuracy of its classification while the generator minimizes it. We show that, with a sufficiently rich discriminator, the adversarial estimator attains parametric efficiency under correct specification and the parametric rate under misspecification. We advocate the use of a neural network as a discriminator that can exploit adaptivity properties and attain fast rates of convergence. We apply our method to the elderly's saving decision model and show that our estimator uncovers the bequest motive as an important source of saving across the wealth distribution, not only for the rich.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2007_06169
institution arXiv
publishDate 2020
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Adversarial Approach to Structural Estimation
Kaji, Tetsuya
Manresa, Elena
Pouliot, Guillaume
Econometrics
Machine Learning
Statistics Theory
Methodology
We propose a new simulation-based estimation method, adversarial estimation, for structural models. The estimator is formulated as the solution to a minimax problem between a generator (which generates simulated observations using the structural model) and a discriminator (which classifies whether an observation is simulated). The discriminator maximizes the accuracy of its classification while the generator minimizes it. We show that, with a sufficiently rich discriminator, the adversarial estimator attains parametric efficiency under correct specification and the parametric rate under misspecification. We advocate the use of a neural network as a discriminator that can exploit adaptivity properties and attain fast rates of convergence. We apply our method to the elderly's saving decision model and show that our estimator uncovers the bequest motive as an important source of saving across the wealth distribution, not only for the rich.
title An Adversarial Approach to Structural Estimation
topic Econometrics
Machine Learning
Statistics Theory
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.06169