A goodness-of-fit test based on neural network sieve estimators

Neural networks have become increasingly popular in the field of machine learning and have been successfully used in many applied fields (e.g., imaging recognition). With more and more research has been conducted on neural networks, we have a better understanding of the statistical proprieties of neural networks. While many studies focus on bounding the prediction error of neural network estimators, limited research has been done on the statistical inference of neural networks. From a statistical point of view, it is of great interest to investigate the statistical inference of neural networks as it could facilitate hypothesis testing in many fields (e.g., genetics, epidemiology, and medical science). In this paper, we propose a goodness-of-fit test statistic based on neural network sieve estimators. The test statistic follows an asymptotic distribution, which makes it easy to use in practice. We have also verified the theoretical asymptotic results via simulation studies and a real data application.