Estimation of Integrated Functionals of a Monotone Density

In this paper we study estimation of integrated functionals of a monotone nonincreasing density $f$ on $[0,\infty)$. We find the exact asymptotic distribution of the natural (tuning parameter-free) plug-in estimator, based on the Grenander estimator. In particular, we show that the simple plug-in estimator is $\sqrt{n}$-consistent, asymptotically normal and is semiparametric efficient. Compared to the previous results on this topic (see e.g., Nickl (2008), Jankowski (2014), and Sohl (2015)) our results holds under minimal assumptions on the underlying $f$ --- we do not require $f$ to be (i) smooth, (ii) bounded away from $0$, or (iii) compactly supported. Further, when $f$ is the uniform distribution on a compact interval we explicitly characterize the asymptotic distribution of the plug-in estimator --- which now converges at a non-standard rate --- thereby extending the results in Groeneboom and Pyke (1983) for the case of the quadratic functional.