The choice of the bandwidth is a crucial issue for kernel density estimation. Among all the data-dependent methods for choosing the bandwidth, the direct plugin method has shown a particularly good performance in practice. This procedure is based on estimating an asymptotic approximation of the optimal bandwidth, using two 'pilot' kernel estimation stages. Although two pilot stages seem to be enough for most densities, for a long time the problem of how to choose an appropriate number of stages

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... has remained open. Here we propose an automatic (i.e., data-based) method for choosing the number of stages to be employed in the plug-in bandwidth selector. Asymptotic properties of the method are presented and an extensive simulation study is carried out to compare its small-sample performance with that of the most recommended bandwidth selectors in the literature.