A comparison of preliminary test, Stein-type and penalty estimators in gamma regression model

Owing to the broad applicability of gamma regression, we propose some improved estimators based on the preliminary test and Stein-type strategies to estimate the unknown parameters in a gamma regression model. These estimators are considered when it is suspected that the parameters may be restricted to a subspace of the parameter space. Two penalty estimators such as LASSO and ridge regression are also presented. An asymptotic theory for the preliminary test and Stein-type estimators is developed, and asymptotic distributional bias and asymptotic quadratic risk of the proposed estimators are obtained. Comprehensive Monte-Carlo simulation experiments are conducted. Comparisons are then made based on simulated relative efficiency to clarify the performance of the proposed estimators. Practitioners are recommended to use the positive-part Stein-type estimator since its performance is robust irrespective of the reliability of the subspace information. A real data on prostate cancer is considered to illustrate the performance of the proposed estimators.