This paper offers an econometric methodology for the detection of self-organisational change (defined in terms of the presence of time irreversibility, structural change and fundamental uncertainty) in economic precesses that follow logistic diffusion growth paths in historical time. The...

Sliced Inverse Regression is a method for reducing the dimension of the explanatory variables x in non-parametric regression problems. Li (1991) discussed a version of this method which begins with a partition of the range of y into slices so that the conditional covariance matrix of x given y...

To overcome the curse of dimensionality, dimension reduction is important andnecessary for understanding the underlying phenomena in a variety of fields.Dimension reduction is the transformation of high-dimensional data into ameaningful representation in the low-dimensional space. It can be...

Thesis (MSc (Mathematical Sciences))--University of Stellenbosch, 2011.

With the rapid development of option markets throughout the world, option pricing has become an important field in financial engineering. Among a variety of option pricing models, volatility of underlying asset is associated with risk and uncertainty, and hence is treated as one of the key...

As is well known, the classic Black-Scholes option pricing model assumes that returns follow Brownian motion. It is widely recognized that return processes differ from this benchmark in at least three important ways. First, asset prices jump, leading to non-normal return innovations. Second,...

We develop a simple robust test for the presence of continuous and discontinuous (jump) components in the price of an asset underlying an option. Our test examines the prices of at-the-money and out-of-the-money options as the option maturity approaches zero. We show that these prices converge...

We consider the hedging of derivative securities when the price movement of the underlying asset can exhibit random jumps. Under a one factor Markovian setting, we derive a spanning relation between a long term option and a continuum of short term options. We then apply this spanning relation to...