The paper proposes a data driven adaptive model selection strategy. The selection crite- rion measures economic exante forecasting content by means of trading implied cash flows. Empirical evidence suggests that the proposed strategy is neither exposed to selection bias nor to the risk of...

Common approaches to test for the economic value of directional forecasts are based on the classical Chi-square test for independence, Fisher’s exact test or the Pesaran and Timmerman (1992) test for market timing. These tests are asymptotically valid for serially independent observations....

It is commonly accepted that information is helpful if it can be exploited to improve a decision making process. In economics, decisions are often based on forecasts of up- or downward movements of the variable of interest. We point out that directional forecasts can provide a useful framework...

In this paper we adopt a principal components analysis (PCA) to reduce the dimensionality of the term structure and employ autoregressive models (AR) to forecast principal components which, in turn, are used to forecast swap rates. Arguing in favor of structural variation, we propose data...

The Desirability Index (DI) is a widely used method for multicriteria optimization in industrial quality control, by which optimal levels of the process influencing factors are determined in order to archieve maximum process quality. In practice however situations may occur in which slight...

In this paper it is shown that the number of latent factors in a multiple multivariate regression model need not be larger than the number of the response variables in order to achieve an optimal prediction. The practical importance of this lemma is outlined and an application of such a...

Pareto-Optimality and the Desirability Index are methods for multicriteria optimization in quality management. In this paper the pareto-optimality of the optimal influence factor settings of a process resulting from maximizing the DI is analyzed and is shown to be valid in most cases.

When trying to interpret estimated parameters the researcher is interested in the (relative) importance of the individual predictors. However, if the predictors are highly correlated, the interpretation of coefficients, e.g. as economic ?multipliers?, is not applicable in standard regression or...

In simulation studies Latent Factor Prediction Pursuit outperformed classical reduced rank regression methods. The algorithm described so far for Latent Factor Prediction Pursuit had two shortcomings: It was only implemented for situations where the explanatory variables were of full colum rank....

When analyzing business cycle data, one observes that the relevant predictor variables are often highly correlated. This paper presents a method to obtain measures of importance for the classification of data in which such multicollinearity is present. In systems with highly correlated variables...