How can we measure and compare the relative performance of production units?If input and output variables are one dimensional, then the simplest way is tocompute efficiency by calculating and comparing the ratio of output and inputfor each production unit. This idea is inappropriate though, when...

Over recent years, study on risk management has been prompted by the Basel committee for regular banking supervisory. There are however limitations of some widely-used risk management methods that either calculate risk measures under the Gaussian distributional assumption or involve numerical...

Risk management technology applied to high dimensional portfolios needs simple and fast methods for calculation of Value-at-Risk (VaR). The multivariate normal framework provides a simple off-the-shelf methodology but lacks the heavy tailed distributional properties that are observed in data. A...

In the ideal Black-Scholes world, financial time series are assumed 1) stationary (time homogeneous) and 2) having conditionally normal distribution given the past. These two assumptions have been widely-used in many methods such as the RiskMetrics, one risk management method considered as...

In recent years, support vector regression (SVR), a novel neural network (NN) technique, has been successfully used for financial forecasting. This paper deals with the application of SVR in volatility forecasting. Based on a recurrent SVR, a GARCH method is proposed and is compared with a...

A great proportion of stock dynamics can be explained using publicly availableinformation. The relationship between dynamics and public information may be ofnonlinear character. In this paper we offer an approach to stock picking by employing so-called decision trees and applying them to XETRA...

Empirical studies have shown that a large number of financial asset returns exhibit fat tails and are often characterized by volatility clustering and asymmetry. Also revealed as a stylized fact is Long memory or long range dependence in market volatility, with significant impact on pricing and...

In the era of Basel II a powerful tool for bankruptcy prognosis isvital for banks. The tool must be precise but also easily adaptable tothe bank's objections regarding the relation of false acceptances (TypeI error) and false rejections (Type II error). We explore the suitabil-ity of Smooth...

Independent component analysis (ICA) is a modern factor analysis tool developed in the last two decades. Given p-dimensional data, we search for that linear combination of data which creates (almost) independent components. Here copulae are used to model the p-dimensional data and then...

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