Forecast combination has been proven to be a very important technique to obtain accurate predictions for various applications in economics, finance, marketing and many other areas. In many applications, forecast errors exhibit heavy-tailed behaviors for various reasons. Unfortunately, to our...

This study is the first attempt to investigate both the linear and non-linear Granger causality between wavelet transformed spot and futures oil prices. Our findings consistently indicate bidirectional causality between the spot and futures oil markets at different time scales, under linear and...

This paper examines point and density forecasts from the European Central Bank’s Survey of Professional Forecasters. We derive individual uncertainty measures along with individual point- and density-based measures of disagreement. We also explore the relationship between uncertainty and...

Binary events are involved in many economic decision problems. In recent years, considerable progress has been made in diverse disciplines in developing models for forecasting binary outcomes. We distinguish between two types of forecasts for binary events that are generally obtained as the...

Our paper aims to evaluate two novel methods on selecting the best forecasting model or its combination based on a Machine Learning approach. The methods are based on the selection of the "best" model, or combination of models, by cross-validation technique, from a set of possible models. The...

When borrowers default or fail to repay the lenders (banks), default–linked risks-so called credit risks do emerge. Such risks are critical to several agents like creditors, borrowing firms, and governments alike. As such, financial engineers have been putting in place some scientific...

We explore the extension of James-Stein type estimators in a direction that enables them to preserve their superiority when the sample size goes to infinity. Instead of shrinking a base estimator towards a fixed point, we shrink it towards a data-dependent point. We provide an analytic...

The paper provides probability estimates of the state of the GDP growth. A regime-switching model defines the probability of the Greek GDP being in boom or recession. Then probit models extract the predictive information of a set of explanatory (economic and financial) variables regarding the...

The purpose of this work is to introduce one of the most promising among recently developed statistical techniques – the support vector machine (SVM) – to corporate bankruptcy analysis. An SVM is implemented for analysing such predictors as financial ratios. A method of adapting it to...