A Comparative Study of Nearest Neighbor Regression and Nadaraya Watson Regression

Abstract

Two non-parametric statistical methods are studied in this work. These are the nearest neighbor regression and the Nadaraya Watson kernel smoothing technique. We have proven that under a precise circumstance, the nearest neighborhood estimator and the Nadaraya Watson smoothing produce a smoothed data with a same error level, which means they have the same performance. Another result of the paper is that nearest neighborhood estimator performs better locally, but it graphically shows a weakness point when a large data set is considered on a global scale.