Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Yu, Lu, Gu, Jiaying, Volgushev, Stanislav
Format: Preprint
Published: 2022
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.01793
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866916117899902976
author Yu, Lu
Gu, Jiaying
Volgushev, Stanislav
author_facet Yu, Lu
Gu, Jiaying
Volgushev, Stanislav
contents Consider a panel data setting where repeated observations on individuals are available. Often it is reasonable to assume that there exist groups of individuals that share similar effects of observed characteristics, but the grouping is typically unknown in advance. We first conduct a local analysis which reveals that the variances of the individual coefficient estimates contain useful information for the estimation of group structure. We then propose a method to estimate unobserved groupings for general panel data models that explicitly account for the variance information. Our proposed method remains computationally feasible with a large number of individuals and/or repeated measurements on each individual. The developed ideas can also be applied even when individual-level data are not available and only parameter estimates together with some quantification of estimation uncertainty are given to the researcher. A thorough simulation study demonstrates superior performance of our method than existing methods and we apply the method to two empirical applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2201_01793
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Spectral Clustering with Variance Information for Group Structure Estimation in Panel Data
Yu, Lu
Gu, Jiaying
Volgushev, Stanislav
Methodology
Machine Learning
Consider a panel data setting where repeated observations on individuals are available. Often it is reasonable to assume that there exist groups of individuals that share similar effects of observed characteristics, but the grouping is typically unknown in advance. We first conduct a local analysis which reveals that the variances of the individual coefficient estimates contain useful information for the estimation of group structure. We then propose a method to estimate unobserved groupings for general panel data models that explicitly account for the variance information. Our proposed method remains computationally feasible with a large number of individuals and/or repeated measurements on each individual. The developed ideas can also be applied even when individual-level data are not available and only parameter estimates together with some quantification of estimation uncertainty are given to the researcher. A thorough simulation study demonstrates superior performance of our method than existing methods and we apply the method to two empirical applications.
title Spectral Clustering with Variance Information for Group Structure Estimation in Panel Data
topic Methodology
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.01793