Smooth mixtures, i.e. mixture models with covariate-dependent mixing weights, are very useful flexible models for conditional densities. Previous work shows that using too simple mixture components for modeling heteroscedastic and/or heavy tailed data can give a poor fit, even with a large...

In this paper we develop statistical models for bankruptcy prediction of Italian firms in the limited liability sector, using annual balance sheet information. Several issues involved in default risk analysis are investigated, such as the structure of the data-base, the sampling procedure and...

We develop a method to estimate and assess uncertainty in the total fertility rate over time. Our estimates are based on multiple imperfect observations from different data sources including surveys and censuses. We take account of measurement error by decomposing it into bias and variance and...

The investigation of species abundance in rivers involves data which are inherently sequential and unlikely to be fully independent. To take these characteristics into account, a Bayesian hierarchical model within the class of hidden Markov models is proposed to map the distribution of...

The influence of maternal health problems on child’s worrying status is important in practice in terms of the intervention of maternal health problems early for the influence on child’s worrying status. Conventional methods apply symmetric prior distributions such as a normal...

Over the last four decades, bankruptcy prediction has given rise to an extensive body of literature, the aim of which was to assess the conditions under which forecasting models perform effectively. Of all the parameters that may influence model accuracy, one has rarely been discussed: the...

Of the methods used to build bankruptcy prediction models in the last twenty years, neural networks are among the most challenging. Despite the characteristics of neural networks, most of the research done until now has not taken them into consideration for building financial failure models, nor...

We propose a general class of models and a unified Bayesian inference methodology for flexibly estimating the density of a response variable conditional on a possibly high-dimensional set of covariates. Our model is a finite mixture of component models with covariate-dependent mixing weights....