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...

A mean field variational Bayes approach to support vector machines (SVMs) using the latent variable representation on Polson and Scott (2012) is presented. This representation allows circumvention of many of the shortcomings associated with classical SVMs including automatic penalty parameter...

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...

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....

Factor models have been applied extensively for forecasting when high dimensional datasets are available. In this case, the number of variables can be very large. For instance, usual dynamic factor models in central banks handle over 100 variables. However, there is a growing body of the...