We introduce a non-Gaussian dynamic mixture model for macroeconomic forecasting. The locally adaptive signal extraction and regression (LASER) model is designed to capture relatively persistent AR processes (signal) which are contaminated by high frequency noise. The distributions of the...

We show how to speed up Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) for Bayesian inference in large data problems by data subsampling. SMC sequentially updates a cloud of particles through a sequence of distributions, beginning with a distribution that is easy to sample from such as the prior and ending with...

Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) samples efficiently from high-dimensional posterior distributions with proposed parameter draws obtained by iterating on a discretized version of the Hamiltonian dynamics. The iterations make HMC computationally costly, especially in problems with large datasets,...

We propose a generic Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to speed up computations for datasets with many observations. A key feature of our approach is the use of the highly effcient difference estimator from the survey sampling literature to estimate the log-likelihood accurately using...

We model a regression density nonparametrically so that at each value of the covariates the density is a mixture of normals with the means, variances and mixture probabilities of the components changing smoothly as a function of the covariates. The model extends existing models in two important...

Time series subject to parameter shifts of random magnitude and timing are commonly modeled with a change-point approach using Chib's (1998) algorithm to draw the break dates. We outline some advantages of an alternative approach in which breaks come through mixture distributions in state...

We demonstrate improvements in predictive power when introducing spline functions to take account of highly non-linear relationships between firm failure and earnings, leverage, and liquidity in a logistic bankruptcy model. Our results show that modeling excessive non-linearities yields...

We introduce a non-Gaussian dynamic mixture model for macroeconomic forecasting. The Locally Adaptive Signal Extraction and Regression (LASER) model is designed to capture relatively persistent AR processes (signal) contaminated by high frequency noise. The distribution of the innovations in...

This paper proposes a simple explanation for the frequent appearance of a price puzzle in VARs designed for monetary policy analysis. It suggests that the best method of solving the puzzle implies a close connection between theory and empirics rather than the introduction of a commodity price....

A general model is proposed for flexibly estimating the density of a continuous response variable conditional on a possibly high-dimensional set of covariates. The model is a finite mixture of asymmetric student-t densities with covariate dependent mixture weights. The four parameters of the...