The Basel II framework strictly defines the conditions under which financial institutions are authorized to accept real estate as collateral in order to decrease their credit risk. A widely used concept for its valuation is the hedonic approach. It assumes, that a property can be characterized...

Modeling real estate prices in the context of hedonic models often involves fitting a Generalized Additive Model, where only the mean of a (lognormal) distribution is regressed on a set of variables without taking other parameters of the distribution into account. Thus far, the application of...

Bayesian methods have become increasingly popular in the past two decades. With the constant rise of computational power even very complex models can be estimated on virtually any modern computer. Moreover, interest has shifted from conditional mean models to probabilistic distributional models...

Bayesian analysis provides a convenient setting for the estimation of complex generalized additive regression models (GAMs). Since computational power has tremendously increased in the past decade it is now possible to tackle complicated inferential problems, e.g., with Markov chain Monte Carlo...

Generalized additive models for location, scale and shape define a flexible, semi-parametric class of regression models for analyzing insurance data in which the exponential family assumption for the response is relaxed. This approach allows the actuary to include risk factors not only in the...