Abstract This paper proposes a rating methodology that is based on a non-linear classification method, a support vector machine, and a non-parametric isotonic regression for mapping rating scores into probabilities of default. We also propose a four data set model validation and training...

Abstract Understanding how people make decisions from risky choices has attracted increasing attention of researchers in economics, psychology and neuroscience. While economists try to evaluate individual’s risk preference through mathematical modeling, neuroscientists answer the question by...

The generalized additive model (GAM) is a multivariate nonparametric regression tool for non-Gaussian responses including binary and count data. We propose a spline-backfitted kernel (SBK) estimator for the component functions and the constant, which are oracally efficient under weak dependence....

Functional data analysis (FDA) has become an important area of statistics research in the recent decade, yet a smooth simultaneous confidence corridor (SCC) does not exist in the literature for the mean function of sparse functional data. SCC is a powerful tool for making statistical inference...

We propose a semiparametric factor model, which approximates the implied volatility surface (IVS) in a finite dimensional function space. Unlike standard principal component approaches typically used to reduce complexity, our approach is tailored to the degenerated design of IVS data. In...

Sex-related homicides tend to arouse wide media coverage and thus raise the urgency to find the responsible offender. However, due to the low frequency of such crimes, domain knowledge lacks completeness. We have therefore accumulated a large data-set and apply several structural learning...

A new method of ICA, TVICA, is proposed. Compared to the conventional ICA, the TVICA method allows the mixing matrix to be time dependent. Estimation is conducted under local homogeneity that assumes at any particular time point, there exists an interval over which the mixing matrix can be well...

In this paper bootstrap confidence bands are constructed for nonparametric quantile estimates of regression functions, where resampling is done from a suitably estimated empirical distribution function (edf) for residuals. It is known that the approximation error for the confidence band by the...

Recently, support vector machine (SVM), a novel artificial neural network (ANN), has been successfully used for financial forecasting. This paper deals with the application of SVM in volatility forecasting under the GARCH framework, the performance of which is compared with simple moving...

We propose a new nonlinear classification method based on a Bayesian "sum-of-trees" model, the Bayesian Additive Classification Tree (BACT), which extends the Bayesian Additive Regression Tree (BART) method into the classification context. Like BART, the BACT is a Bayesian nonparametric additive...