Measuring and modeling financial volatility is the key to derivative pricing, asset allocation and risk management. The recent availability of high-frequency data allows for refined methods in this field. In particular, more precise measures for the daily or lower frequency volatility can be...

In this paper we provide a review of copula theory with applications to finance. We illustrate the idea on the bivariate framework and discuss the simple, elliptical and Archimedean classes of copulae. Since the copulae model the dependency structure between random variables, next we explain the...

Dimension reduction techniques for functional data analysis model and approximate smooth random functions by lower dimensional objects. In many applications the focus of interest lies not only in dimension reduction but also in the dynamic behaviour of the lower dimensional objects. The most...

Stock picking is the field of financial analysis that is of particular interest for many professional investors and researchers. In this study stock picking is implemented via binary classification trees. Optimal tree size is believed to be the crucial factor in forecasting performance of the...

Let (X1, Y1), . . ., (Xn, Yn) be i.i.d. rvs and let l(x) be the unknownp-quantile regression curve of Y on X. A quantile-smootherln(x) is a localised, nonlinear estimator of l(x). The strong uniformconsistency rate is established under general conditions. In many applicationsit is necessary to...

A great proportion of stock dynamics can be explained using publicly availableinformation. The relationship between dynamics and public information may be ofnonlinear character. In this paper we offer an approach to stock picking by employing so-called decision trees and applying them to XETRA...

Empirical studies have shown that a large number of financial asset returns exhibit fat tails and are often characterized by volatility clustering and asymmetry. Also revealed as a stylized fact is Long memory or long range dependence in market volatility, with significant impact on pricing and...

In the era of Basel II a powerful tool for bankruptcy prognosis isvital for banks. The tool must be precise but also easily adaptable tothe bank's objections regarding the relation of false acceptances (TypeI error) and false rejections (Type II error). We explore the suitabil-ity of Smooth...

Independent component analysis (ICA) is a modern factor analysis tool developed in the last two decades. Given p-dimensional data, we search for that linear combination of data which creates (almost) independent components. Here copulae are used to model the p-dimensional data and then...

We propose a new nonlinear classification method based on a Bayesian "sum-of-trees" model, the Bayesian Additive Classification Tree (BACT), whichextends the Bayesian Additive Regression Tree (BART) method into the classification context. Like BART, the BACT is a Bayesian nonparametric...