Intermittent demand commonly occurs with inventory data, with many time periods having no demand and small demand in the other periods. Croston's method is a widely used procedure for intermittent demand forecasting. However, it is an ad hoc method with no properly formulated underlying...

A large number of functional forms have been suggested in the literature for estimating Lorenz curves that describe the relationship between income and population shares. One way of choosing a particular functional form is to pick the one that best fits the data in some sense. Another approach,...

This paper proposes neural network based measures of predictability in conditional mean, and then uses them to construct nonlinear analogues to autocorrelograms and partial autocorrelograms. In contrast to other measures of nonlinear dependence that rely on nonparametric estimation of densities...

This paper compares the performance of several tests for stochastic dominance up to order three using Monte Carlo methods. The tests considered are the Davidson and Duclos (2000) test, the Anderson test (1996) and the Kaur, Rao and Singh (1994) test. Only unpaired samples of independent...

A perceived increase in correlation during turbulent market conditions implies a reduction in the benefits arising from portfolio diversification. Unfortunately, it is exactly then that these benefits are most needed. To determine whether diversification truly breaks down, we investigate the...

The aim of this paper is to examine the measurement of persistence in a range of time series models nested in the framework of Cramer (1961). This framework is a generalization of the Wold (1938) decomposition for stationary time series which, in addition to accommodating the standard I(0) and...

A new class of option price models is developed and applied to options on the Australian S&P200 Index. The class of models generalizes the traditional Black-Scholes framework by accommodating time-varying conditional volatility, skewness and excess kurtosis in the underlying returns process. An...

We apply a logistic smooth transition market model (LSTM) to a sample of returns on Australian industry portfolios to investigate whether bull and bear market betas differ. Unlike other studies, our LSTM model allows for smooth transition between bull and bear states and allows the data to...

In this paper, an adaptive smoothing forecasting approach based on evolutionary spectra as developed by Rao and Shapiro (1970) is applied to the 3003 time series of various types and lengths used in the M3-Competition (Makridakis and Hibon, 2000). Comparisons of out-of-sample forecasts are made...

Fat-tailed distributions are used to model claims on general insurance contracts under which extremely large claims are a very real possibility. Since estimation of the tail-fatness parameter is notoriously difficult - it is one of the major outstanding statistical/actuarial problems - methods...