The index of increase in the presence of measurement errors and the inevitability of striking a balance between determinism and randomness
We introduce a modification of the index of increase that works in both deterministic and random environments, and thus allows us to assess monotonicity of functions that are prone to random measurement errors. We prove consistency of the empirical index and show how its rate of convergence is influenced by deterministic and random parts of the data. In particular, the obtained results allow us to determine the frequency at which observations should be taken in order to reach any pre-specified level of estimation precision. We illustrate the performance of the suggested estimator using simulated data arising from purely deterministic and error-contaminated monotonic and non-monotonic functions.
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