The Nadaraya-Watson nonparametric estimator of regression is known to be highly sensitive to the presence of outliers in data.This sensitivity can be reduced, for example, by using local L-estimates of regression.Whereas the local L-estimation is traditionally done using an empirical conditional...

Most dimension reduction methods based on nonparametric smoothing are highly sensitive to outliers and to data coming from heavy-tailed distributions.We show that the recently proposed methods by Xia et al.(2002) can be made robust in such a way that preserves all advantages of the original...

We compare several parametric and non-parametric approaches for modelling variance swap curves by conducting an in-sample and an out-of-sample analysis using market prices. The forecasted Heston model gives the best overall performance. Moreover, the static Heston model highlights some problems...

Predicting default risk is important for firms and banks to operate successfully. There are many reasons to use nonlinear techniques for predicting bankruptcy from financial ratios. Here we propose the so-called Support Vector Machine (SVM) to predict the default risk of German firms. Our...

We consider a generalized partially linear model E(Y|X,T) = G{X'b + m(T)} where G is a known function, b is an unknown parameter vector, and m is an unknown function.The paper introduces a test statistic which allows to decide between a parametric and a semiparametric model: (i) m is linear,...