Hurst function estimation

This paper considers a wide range of issues concerning the estimation of the Hurst function of a multifractional Brownian motion when the process is observed on a regular grid. A theoretical lower bound for the minimax risk of this inference problem is established for a wide class of smooth Hurst functions. We also propose a new nonparametric estimator and show that it is rate optimal. Implementation issues of the estimator including how to overcome the presence of a nuisance parameter and choose the tuning parameter from data will be considered. An extensive numerical study is conducted to compare our approach with other approaches.