Tests for causality and rationality in the coffee futures market were carried out using data from the New York Market. Tests of causality indicated that futures prices strongly influence variations in spot price eight weeks or more to maturity. However, beginning seven weeks to maturity there...

This is a summary of the paper entitled : “The Mean Squared Prediction Error Paradox”. In that paper, we show that traditional comparisons of Mean Squared Prediction Error (MSPE) between two competing forecasts may be highly controversial. This is so because when some specific conditions of...

Weather is a key production factor in agricultural crop production and at the same time the most significant and least controllable source of peril in agriculture. These effects of weather on agricultural crop production have triggered a widespread support for weather derivatives as a means of...

Monotonic estimation for the survival probability of a loan in a risk-rated portfolio is based on the observation arising, for example, from loan pricing that a loan with a lower credit risk rating is more likely to survive than a loan with a higher credit risk rating, given the same additional...

Minimum cross-entropy estimation is an extension to the maximum likelihood estimation for multinomial probabilities. Given a probability distribution {r_i }_(i=1)^k, we show in this paper that the monotonic estimates {p_i }_(i=1)^k for the probability distribution by minimum cross-entropy are...

This dissertation focuses on forecasting rare macroeconomic events, such as GDP declines and currency crises, using non-parametric methods, highlighting the advantages of the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves analysis and the value of qualitative information from expert surveys and...

This work demonstrates that forecast of foreign exchange (FX) daily closing prices using the normal inverse Gaussian (NIG) and Variance Gamma (VG) Levy processes outperform the naïve Random Walk model. We use the open software R to estimate NIG and VG distribution parameters and perform several...

This paper introduces the concept of Temporal Hierarchies for time series forecasting. A temporal hierarchy can be constructed for any time series by means of non-overlapping temporal aggregation. Predictions constructed at all aggregation levels are combined with the proposed framework to...

This study examines methods for analyzing and forecasting the retention of active subscribers in the telecommunications industry using various criteria for subscriber activity. The results demonstrate that the retention dynamics of an active subscriber base can be effectively modeled using a...

This study examines methods for analyzing and forecasting the retention of active subscribers in the telecommunications industry using various criteria for subscriber activity. The results demonstrate that the retention dynamics of an active subscriber base can be effectively modeled using a...