What is "empirical regression"? I was asked how much I know of "empirical regression." I have never heard the expression. A web search yielded nothing useful. I suspect it is a term coined by someone to refer to some ad hoc procedure which might be known by other name.
Has anyone have a reference?
 A: Empirical regression is a technique in non-parametric regression. The key idea is to estimate the joint density of X, Y, denotes p(X,Y). From this joint density one can derive conditional p(Y|X), and conditional mean E(Y|X). This E(Y|X) is empirical regression. This empirical regression technique was proposed by Schmerling and Peil (1985).
It is described in Hardle (1990): Applied Nonparametric Regression. Here is a link to the page
Here is the original reference
A: If this was in the context of cognitive psychology or especially psycholinguistics and/or eye-tracking, they may have been talking about linear regression with an emirical logit transformation, which is a way of avoiding having to do logistic regression.
Empirical logit regression involves creating bins of observations and applying a modified logit transformation that adds $\frac1{2n}$ successes to each bin to avoid (negative and positive) infinitity for bins with $0$ successes or $0$ failures, then doing linear regression using a weighted least squares.
This is potentially attractive in some situations where it's hard to fit logistic regression, and there have been some arguments for using it with data where the sample rate exceeds the rate of the phenomenon you're sampling (as with modern eye-trackers, which far exceed human saccade frequency). There are some drawbacks to not actually doing logistic regression though.
