In this paper business cycles are considered as a multivariate phenomenon and not as a univariate one determined e.g. by the GNP. The subject is to look for the number of phases of a business cycle, which can be motivated by the number of clusters in a given dataset of macro-economic variables....

We analyse the cross-country dimension of financial cycles by studying cyclical co-movements in credit, house prices, equity prices and interest rates across the G7 economies. We use wavelet-based statistics to assess at which frequencies cyclical fluctuations and their crosscountry co-movements...

Acknowledging the fact that the growth experience of countries is seldom well described by the average growth rate, this paper aims at identifying countries that are similar in terms of their growth process, thus emphasizing the dynamics of growth rates. To that end, the growth experience of...

Building homogenous classes is one of the main goals in clustering. Homogeneity can be measured by the intra-class variance (Bock, 1998). Especially in erosion projects but in other applications as well the separation between the built classes is as important as the homogeneity of the classes....

When analyzing business cycle data, one observes that the relevant predictor variables are often highly correlated. This paper presents a method to obtain measures of importance for the classification of data in which such multicollinearity is present. In systems with highly correlated variables...

The optimization of the hyper-parameters of a statistical procedure or machine learning task is a crucial step for obtaining a minimal error. Unfortunately, the optimization of hyper-parameters usually requires many runs of the procedure and hence is very costly. A more detailed knowledge of the...

Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) performs well for classifica- tion of business phases even though the premises of an LDA are not met. As the variables are highly correlated there are numerical as well as interpretational shortcomings. By transforming the classification problem to a regression...

This paper deals with the problem of the discrimination between wellpredictable and not-well-predictable time series. One criterion for the separation is given by the size of the Lyapunov exponent, which was originally defined for deterministic systems. However, the Lyapunov exponent can also be...