In this paper we study what professional forecasters actually explain. We use spectral analysis and state space modeling to decompose economic time series into a trend, a business-cycle, and an irregular component. To examine which components are captured by professional forecasters we regress...

We present a model for hourly electricity load forecasting based on stochastically time-varying processes that are designed to account for changes in customer behaviour and in utility production efficiencies. The model is periodic: it consists of different equations and different parameters for...

State space models with nonstationary processes and fixed regression effects require a state vector with diffuse initial conditions. Different likelihood functions can be adopted for the estimation of parameters in time series models with diffuse initial conditions. In this paper we consider...

We consider the problem of smoothing data on two-dimensional grids with holes or gaps. Such grids are often referred to as difficult regions. Since the data is not observed on these locations, the gap is not part of the domain. We cannot apply standard smoothing methods since they smooth over...

We consider likelihood inference and state estimation by means of importance sampling for state space models with a nonlinear non-Gaussian observation y ~ p(y lpha) and a linear Gaussian state alpha ~ p(alpha). The importance density is chosen to be the Laplace approximation of the smoothing...

We consider the dynamic factor model where the loading matrix, the dynamic factors and the disturbances are treated as latent stochastic processes. We present empirical Bayes methods that enable the efficient shrinkage-based estimation of the loadings and the factors. We show that our estimates...

We introduce a new and general methodology for analyzing vector autoregressive models with time-varying coefficient matrices and conditionally heteroskedastic disturbances. Our proposed method is able to jointly treat a dynamic latent factor model for the autoregressive coefficient matrices and...

This article presents a new filter for state-space models based on Bellman's dynamic programming principle applied to the posterior mode. The proposed Bellman filter generalises the Kalman filter including its extended and iterated versions, while remaining equally inexpensive computationally....

A growing number of empirical studies provides evidence that dynamic properties of macroeconomic time series have been changing over time. Model-based procedures for the measurement of business cycles should therefore allow model parameters to adapt over time. In this paper the time dependencies...