Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to perform a comparative study of prediction performances of an artificial neutral network (ANN) model against a linear prediction model like a linear discriminant analysis (LDA) with regards to forecasting corporate credit ratings from financial...

We study model selection strategies based on penalized empirical loss minimization. We point out a tight relationship between error estimation and data-based complexity penalization: any good error estimate may be converted into a data-based penalty function and the performance of the estimate...

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The huge popularity of Hidden Markov models in pattern recognition is due to the ability to 'learn' model parameters from an observation sequence through Baum-Welch and other re-estimation procedures. In the case of HMM parameter estimation from an ensemble of observation sequences, rather than...

Previous research has suggested that depth of search in chess does not increase much as a function of skill. We submitted players to a problem-solving task with complex positions. We found a strong skill effect in depth of search, rate of search, and number of nodes generated. At the level of...

This thesis is based on research on financial time series analysis using pattern recognition methods. The first part of this research focuses on univariate time series analysis using different pattern recognition methods. First, probabilities of basic patterns are used to represent the features...

In this paper, we develop a new framework for face recognition based on nonparametric discriminant analysis (NDA) and multi-classifier integration. Traditional LDA-based methods suffer a fundamental limitation originating from the parametric nature of scatter matrices, which are based on the...

A time series analysis was performed on medical scheme statistics with the aim of determining current and future demographic and economic trends. This would enable one to reach a better perspective on the current and future financial dilemma presently experienced by medical schemes. Data for the...

CMBS are an important segment of the real estate debt markets which reduce the commercial property sector's dependence on bank financing. Until the advent of the credit squeeze in Q3:2007, the CMBS market was one of the most dynamic and fastest-growing sectors in the capital markets, for a...