We are interested in forecasting bankruptcies in a probabilistic way. Specifcally, we com- pare the classification performance of several statistical and machine-learning techniques, namely discriminant analysis (Altman's Z-score), logistic regression, least-squares support vector machines and...

Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Relevance Vector Machines (RVM) were used to predict daily returns for an FX carry basket. Market observable exogenous variables known to have a relationship with the basket along with lags of the basket's return were used as...

This paper discusses the need for a missing value technique to fill in gaps in time series representing foreign exchange (FX) prices and assist in the observation of potential arbitrage opportunities. It highlights the requirement for prediction methods to establish the persistence of these...

Highly non-elliptical posterior distributions may occur in several econometric models, in particular, when the likelihood information is allowed to dominate and data information is weak. We explain the issue of highly non-elliptical posteriors in a model for the effect of education on income...

Likelihoods and posteriors of instrumental variable regression models with strong endogeneity and/or weak instruments may exhibit rather non-elliptical contours in the parameter space. This may seriously affect inference based on Bayesian credible sets. When approximating such contours using...

The performance of Monte Carlo integration methods like importance sampling or Markov Chain Monte Carlo procedures greatly depends on the choice of the importance or candidate density. Usually, such a density has to be "close" to the target density in order to yield numerically accurate results...

Likelihoods and posteriors of econometric models with strong endogeneity and weak instruments may exhibit rather non-elliptical contours in the parameter space. This feature also holds for cointegration models when near non-stationarity occurs and determining the number of cointegrating...

Likelihoods and posteriors of instrumental variable regression models with strong endogeneity and/or weak instruments may exhibit rather non-elliptical contours in the parameter space. This may seriously affect inference based on Bayesian credible sets. When approximating such contours using...

In this paper we discuss several aspects of simulation based Bayesian econometric inference. We start at an elementary level on basic concepts of Bayesian analysis; evaluating integrals by simulation methods is a crucial ingredient in Bayesian inference. Next, the most popular and well-known...