Discovering the preferences and the behaviour of consumers is a key challenge in marketing. Information about such topics can be gathered through surveys in which the respondents must assign a score to a number of items. In this article we suggest a strategy to analyze such data and achieve this...

In spite of the widespread use of generalized additive models (GAMs), there is no well established methodology for simultaneous inference and variable selection for the components of GAM. There is no doubt that both, inference on the marginal component functions and their selection, are...

There are two main research traditions for analyzing market basket data that exist more or less independently from each other, namely exploratory and explanatory model types. Exploratory approaches are restricted to the task of discovering cross-category interrelationships and provide marketing...

In this article, we present new ideas concerning Non-Gaussian Component Analysis (NGCA). We use the structural assumption that a high-dimensional random vector X can be represented as a sum of two components - a lowdimensional signal S and a noise component N. We show that this assumption...

Let a high-dimensional random vector ⃗X can be represented as a sum of two components - a signal ⃗S , which belongs to some low-dimensional subspace S, and a noise component ⃗N . This paper presents a new approach for estimating the subspace S based on the ideas of the Non-Gaussian...

Many of the concepts in theoretical and empirical finance developed over the past decades – including the classical portfolio theory, the Black-Scholes-Merton option pricing model or the RiskMetrics variance-covariance approach to VaR – rest upon the assumption that asset returns follow a...

This chapter deals with the estimation of risk neutral distributions for pricing index options resulting from the hypothesis of the risk neutral valuation principle. After justifying this hypothesis, we shall focus on parametric estimation methods for the risk neutral density functions...

In this paper we give a generalized model of the interest rates term structure including Nelson-Siegel and Svensson structure. For that we introduce a continuous m-factor exponential-polynomial form of forward interest rates and demonstrate its considerably better performance in a fitting of the...