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...

We propose an innovations form of the structural model underlying exponential smoothing that is further augmented by a latent Markov switching process. A particular case of the new model is the local level model with a switching drift, where the switching component describes the change between...

The object of this paper is to produce distributional forecasts of physical volatility and its associated risk premia using a non-Gaussian, non-linear state space approach. Option and spot market information on the unobserved variance process is captured by using dual 'model-free' variance...

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...

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...

The impact of parameterisation on the simulation efficiency of Bayesian Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms for two non-Gaussian state space models is examined. Specifically, focus is given to particular forms of the stochastic conditional duration (SCD) model and the stochastic...

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...

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...

The object of this paper is to produce non-parametric maximum likelihood estimates of forecast distributions in a general non-Gaussian, non-linear state space setting. The transition densities that define the evolution of the dynamic state process are represented in parametric form, but 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...