Huber's estimator has had a long lasting impact, particularly on robust statistics. It is well known that under certain conditions, Huber's estimator is asymptotically minimax. A moderate generalization in rederiving Huber's estimator shows that Huber's estimator is not the only choice. We...

In this thesis we are interested in the impact of economic and financial factors, such as interest rate, tax payment, reinsurance, and investment return, on insurance business. The underlying risk models of insurance business that we consider range from the classical compound Poisson risk model...

Zero-inflated data abound in ecological studies as well as in other scientific and quantitative fields. Nonparametric regression with zero-inflated response may be studied via the zero-inflated generalized additive model (ZIGAM). ZIGAM assumes that the conditional distribution of the response...

Credit derivatives are among the most criticized financial instruments in the current credit crises. Given their short history, finance professionals are still researching to discover effective ways to reduce the mark-to-market (MTM) volatility in credit derivatives, especially in turbulent...

When categorical data are misplaced into the wrong category, we say the data is affected by misclassification. This is common for data collection. It is well-known that naive estimators of category probabilities and coefficients for regression that ignore misclassification can be biased. In this...

The spate of highly publicized instances of malfeasance by corporate leaders in recent years underscores the importance of the following learning objective formally adopted by our business college for all its undergraduate business majors: the student will be able to recognize, and analyze and...

Motivated by the need of estimating the main spawning period of North Sea cod, we develop a common transfer function model with a panel of contemporaneously correlated times series data. This model incorporates (i) the smoothness on the parameters by assuming that the second differences are...

This undergraduate class serves as an introduction to probability and statistics, with emphasis on engineering applications. The first segment discusses events and their probability, Bayes' Theorem, discrete and continuous random variables and vectors, univariate and multivariate distributions,...

This course is a self-contained introduction to statistics with economic applications. Elements of probability theory, sampling theory, statistical estimation, regression analysis, and hypothesis testing. It uses elementary econometrics and other applications of statistical tools to economic...