Downside Risk Evaluation with the R Package GAS

Financial risk managers routinely use non-linear time series models to predict the downside risk of the capital under management. They also need to evaluate the adequacy of their model using so-called backtesting procedures. The latter involve hypothesis testing and evaluation of loss functions. This paper shows how the R package GAS can be used for both the dynamic prediction and the evaluation of downside risk. Emphasis is given to the two key financial downside risk measures: Value-at-Risk (VaR) and Expected Shortfall (ES). High-level functions for: (i) prediction, (ii) backtesting, and (iii) model comparison are discussed, and code examples are provided. An illustration using the series of log-returns of the Dow Jones Industrial Average constituents is reported