Jackknife Empirical Likelihood

Abstract

Empirical likelihood has been found very useful in many different occasions. However, when applied directly to some more complicated statistics such as U-statistics, it runs into serious computational difficulties. In this paper, we introduce a so-called jackknife empirical likelihood (JEL) method. The new method is extremely simple to use in practice. In particular, the JEL is shown to be very effective in handling one and two-sample U-statistics. The JEL can be potentially useful for other nonlinear statistics.