Limiting properties of monotone rearrangements of estimators when the truth is flat

Abstract

Monotone rearrangements provide a simple way to enforce shape constraints of an estimator, but existing distributional theory does not cover flat regions, where the target induces no local ordering. We study rearranged estimators in two canonical flat settings. First, for a histogram estimator of the uniform density, we establish functional weak convergence of its non-decreasing rearrangement at the parametric rate on compact subsets of the interval $(0,1)$ after an additional deterministic centering. This result is strikingly different from what is known for strictly monotone densities. Second, we consider two rearranged estimators of rearranged copulas under independence, based on empirical-copula increments and on a checkerboard approximation. After appropriate centering and rescaling, both estimators converge weakly on $[0,1]^2$ to an integrated Gaussian process which was not known before. We further use these results to prove asymptotic normality for a broad class of rearranged copula-based dependence measures, which were recently discussed in Strothmann et al. (2024).