This paper develops a new non-linear model to analyse the business cycle by exploiting the relationship between the asymmetrical behaviour of the cycle and leading indicators. The model proposed is an innovations form of the structural model underlying simple exponential smoothing that is...

This paper studies linear and nonlinear autoregressive leading indicator models of business cycles in G7 countries. The models use the spread between short-term and long-term interest rates as leading indicators for GDP, and their success in capturing business cycles is gauged by non-parametric...

This paper studies linear and linear autoregressive leading indicator models of business cycles in OECD countries. The models use the spread between short-term and long-term interest rates as leading indicators for GDP, and their success in capturing business cycles gauged by the non-parametric...

We develop nonlinear leading indicator models for GDP growth, with the interest rate spread and growth in M2 as leading indicators. Since policy makers are typically interested in whether or not a recession is imminent, we evaluate these models according to their ability to predict the...

This paper proposes two new weighting schemes that average forecasts using different estimation windows to account for structural change. We let the weights reflect the probability of each time point being the most-recent break point, and we use the reversed ordered Cusum test statistics to...

This paper studies the All Ordinaries Index in Australia, and its futures contract known as the Share Price Index. We use a new form of smooth transition model to account for a variety of nonlinearities caused by transaction costs and other market/data imperfections, and given the recent...

A new approach to inference in state space models is proposed, based on approximate Bayesian computation (ABC). ABC avoids evaluation of the likelihood function by matching observed summary statistics with statistics computed from data simulated from the true process; exact inference being...

The segmentation problem arises in many applications in data mining, A.I. and statistics. In this paper, we consider segmenting simple time series. We develop two Bayesian approaches for segmenting a time series, namely the Bayes Factor approach, and the Minimum Message Length (MML) approach. We...

The application of traditional forecasting methods to discrete count data yields forecasts that are non-coherent. That is, such methods produce non-integer point and interval predictions which violate the restrictions on the sample space of the integer variable. This paper presents a methodology...

In this paper, a Bayesian version of the exponential smoothing method of forecasting is proposed. The approach is based on a state space model containing only a single source of error for each time interval. This model allows us to improve current practices surrounding exponential smoothing by...