ORTHOGONALITY OF ESTIMATING FUNCTIONS AND NUISANCE PARAMETERS

Cox & Reid (1987) proposed the technique of orthogonalizing parameters, to deal with the general problem of nuisance parameters, within fully parametric models. They obtained a large-sample approximation to the conditional likelihood. Along the same lines Davison (1988) studied generalized linear models. In the present paper we deal with the problem of nuisance parameters, within a semiparametric setup which includes the class of distributions associated with generalized linear models. The technique used is that of optimum orthogonal estimating functions (Godambe & Thompson, 1989). The results are related to those of Cox & Reid (1987).