Quantile Regression
Quantile Regression
Ani Katchova
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Quantile Regression
Consumer economics: effects of household income on food expenditures for low- and high-
expenditure households.
Education: factors affecting student scores along their score distribution.
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Quantile regression model
where is the vector of unknown parameters associated with the qth quantile.
The OLS minimizes ∑ , the sum of squares of the model prediction error
The median regression, also called least absolute-deviation regression minimizes ∑ | |
The quantile regression minimizes ∑ | | ∑ 1 | |, a sum that gives the asymmetric
penalties | | for underprediction and 1 | | for overprediction
The qth quantile regression estimator minimizes over the objective function
∑: ′ ′
′ ∑ : ′ 1
where 0 1.
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In contrast to OLS and maximum likelihood, the quantile regression computational
implementation uses linear programming methods.
We have instead of β to make clear that different choices of q estimate different values of β.
′
|
For the jth regressor, the marginal effect is the coefficient for the qth quantile.
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Unlike interpretations of OLS regression, the interpretations of quantile regression results need
to specify which quantile of the dependent variable they refer to.
Two types of significance are important for quantile regression coefficients.
o Quantile coefficients can be significantly different from zero.
o Quantile coefficients can be significantly different than the OLS coefficients, showing
different effects along the distribution of the dependent variable.