This thesis presents a new forecasting technique that estimates energy demand by applying a Bayesian approach to forecasting. We introduce our Bayesian Heating Oil Forecaster (BHOF), which forecasts daily heating oil demand for individual customers who are enrolled in an automatic delivery...

Over the last 50 years there has been an enormous explosion in developing full distributional analogues of the Kalman filter. In this paper we explore how some of the second-order processes discovered by Kalman have their analogues in Bayesian state space models. Many of the analogues in the...

In this paper we show that in the lognormal discrete-time stochastic volatility model with predictable conditional expected returns, the conditional expected value of the discounted payoff of a European call option is infinite. Our empirical illustration shows that the characteristics of the...

Wheat yield in Western Australia (WA) depends critically on rainfall during three periods – germination, growing and flowering. The degree of uncertainty attached to a wheat-yield prediction depends on whether the prediction is made before or after the rainfall in each period has been...

We extend the recently introduced latent threshold dynamic models to include dependencies among the dynamic latent factors which underlie multivariate volatility. With an ability to induce time-varying sparsity in factor loadings, these models now also allow time-varying correlations among...