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...

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...

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...

The accurate forecast of the foreign currencies exchange rates at the ultra high frequency electronic trading in the foreign currencies exchange markets is a main topic of our research: 1) the present state of the foreign currencies exchange markets in Asia, Europe and North America; 2) 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...

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...

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...

For hundred years the future was occupying the persons. The ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, the Indians, the Chinese and other great ancient cultures, but also the modern, as the English, Germans and the Americans and with the help of the development of technology and computers they...

We summarize the literature on the effectiveness of combining forecasts by assessing the conditions under which combining is most valuable. Using data on the six U.S. Presidential elections from 1992 through 2012, we then report the reduction in error obtained by averaging forecasts within and...