Elliptical functional models

Abstract

In this paper, functional models with not replications are investigated within the class of the elliptical distributions. Emphasis is placed on the special case of the Student-t distribution. Main results encompasses consistency and asymptotic normality of the maximum likelihood estimators. Due to the presence of incidental parameters. standard maximum likelihood methodology cannot be used to obtain the main results, which require extensions of some existing results related to elliptical distributions. Asymptotic relative efficiencies an reported which show that the generalized least squares estimator can be highly inefficient when compared with the maximum likelihood estimator under nonnormality. (C) 1998 Academc Press.