Nadaraya’s estimates for large quantiles and free disposal support curves

A new characterization of partial boundaries of a free disposal multivariate support, lying near the true support curve, is introduced by making use of large quantiles of a simple transformation of the underlying multivariate distribution. Pointwise empirical and smoothed estimators of the full and partial support curves are built as extreme sample and smoothed quantiles. The extreme-value theory holds then automatically for the empirical frontiers and we show that some fundamental properties of extreme order statistics carry over to Nadaraya’s estimates of upper quantile-based frontiers. The benefits of the new class of partial boundaries are illustrated through simulated examples and a real data set, and both empirical and smoothed estimates are compared via Monte Carlo experiments. When the transformed distribution is attracted to the Weibull extreme-value type distribution, the smoothed estimator of the full frontier outperforms frankly the sample estimator in terms of both bias and Mean-Squared Error, under optimal bandwidth. In this domain of attraction, Nadaraya’s estimates of extreme quantiles might be superior to the sample versions in terms of MSE although they have a higher bias. However, smoothing seems to be useless in the heavy tailed case.