Improving score-driven density forecasts with an application to implied volatility surface dynamics

Point forecasts of score-driven models have been shown to behave at par with those of state-space models under a variety of circumstances. We show, however, that density rather than point forecasts of plain-vanilla score-driven models substantially underperform their state-space counterparts in a factor model context. We uncover the origins of this phenomenon and show how a simple adjustment of the measurement density of the score-driven model can put score-driven and state-space models approximately back on an equal footing again. The score-driven models can subsequently easily be extended with non-Gaussian features to fit the data even better without complicating parameter estimation. We illustrate our findings using a factor model for the implied volatility surface of S&P500 index options data.