In the study of finance, likelihood based or moment based methods are frequently used to estimate parameters for various kinds of models given the sampled return data. While the former method is not robust, the latter one suffers from loss of efficiency and high noise-to-signal ratio in the...

Hurricanes are one of the major natural disturbances affecting human livelihoods in coastal zones worldwide. Assessing hurricane risk is an important step toward mitigating the impact of tropical storms on human life and property. This study uses NOAA’s historical tropical cyclone database...

The consistency of the local kernel density estimator is proved. This nonparametric estimator is distinguished by its use of scaling matrices which are random and which may vary for each sample point. Its applications include adaptive construction of importance sampling functions.