The papers in this special issue of Mathematics and Computers in Simulation cover the following topics: improving judgmental adjustment of model-based forecasts, whether forecast updates are progressive, on a constrained mixture vector autoregressive model, whether all estimators are born equal:...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in <Stochastic Models</I> (2012). Volume 28(3), pages 478-502.<P> We apply the splitting method to three well-known counting problems, namely 3-SAT, random graphs with prescribed degrees, and binary contingency tables. We present an enhanced version of the splitting method...</p></stochastic>

A large number of exact inferential procedures in statistics and econometrics involve the sampling distribution of ratios of random variables. If the denominator variable is positive, then tail probabilities of the ratio can be expressed as those of a suitably defined difference of random...

Adaptive Polar Sampling (APS) is proposed as a Markov chain Monte Carlomethod for Bayesian analysis of models with ill-behaved posteriordistributions. In order to sample efficiently from such a distribution,a location-scale transformation and a transformation to polarcoordinates are used. After...

The characteristic functions of many affine jump-diffusion models, such as Heston’s stochastic volatility model and all of its extensions, involve multivalued functions such as the complex logarithm. If we restrict the logarithm to its principal branch, as is done in most software packages,...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in 'Quantitative Finance', 2010, 10, 177-194.<P> When using an Euler discretisation to simulate a mean-reverting square root process, one runs into the problem that while the process itself is guaranteed to be nonnegative, the discretisation is not....</p>

At the time of writing this article, Fourier inversion is the computational method of choice for a fast and accurate calculation of plain vanilla option prices in models with an analytically available characteristic function. Shifting the contour of integration along the complex plane allows for...

By combining two alternative formulations of a test statistic with two alternative resamplingschemes we obtain four different bootstrap tests. In the context of static linear regression modelstwo of these are shown to have serious size and power problems, whereas the remaining two areadequate...

We propose new forecast combination schemes for predicting turning points of business cycles. The combination schemes deal with the forecasting performance of a given set of models and possibly providing better turning point predictions. We consider turning point predictions generated by...

In this paper we replace the Gaussian errors in the standard Gaussian, linear state space model with stochastic volatility processes. This is called a GSSF-SV model. We show that conventional MCMC algorithms for this type of model are ineffective, but that this problem can be removed by...