A decisive question in nonparametric smoothing techniques is the choice of the bandwidth or smoothing parameter. The present paper addresses this question when using local polynomial approximations for estimating the regression function and its derivatives. A fully-automatic bandwidth selection procedure has been proposed by Fan and Gijbels (1995), and the empirical performance of it was tested...

In previous work, we have developed a principled way of learning the causal structure of linear latent variable models (Silva et al., 2006). However, we have considered the case for models with pure measures only. Pure measures are observed variables that measure no more than one latent variable. This paper presents theoretical extensions that justify the selection of some types of impure measu...