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....

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....

Cluster studies have shown that innovation can be understood as the result of an inter- organizational process, where a division of labor with regard to exploration and exploitation exists among the actors inside the cluster. A cluster is ambidextrous if it manages to balance innovative...

We study the effects of a German national cluster policy on the structure of collaboration networks. The empirical analysis is based on original data that was collected in fall 2011 and late summer 2013 with cluster actors (firms and public research organizations) who received government...

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...

This paper analyses the influence of 13 stylized facts of the German economy on the West German business cycles from 1955 to 1994. The method used in this investigation is Statistical Experimental Design with orthogonal factors. We are looking for all existing Plackett-Burman designs realizable...