As is well known, the likelihood in the Gaussian mixture is unbounded for any parameters such that a Dirac is placed at any observed sample point. The behavior of the EM algorithm near a degenerated solution is studied. It is established that there exists a domain of attraction around degeneracy...

A new approach to species distribution modelling based on unsupervised classification via a finite mixture of GAMs incorporating habitat suitability curves is proposed. A tailored EM algorithm is outlined for computing maximum likelihood estimates. Several submodels incorporating various...

This paper investigates the relationship between federal election outcomes and expected returns and volatilities in the Canadian money, bond, equity and currency markets from 1951 to 2006. There is little evidence that investment opportunities are different in minority versus majority...

"This paper presents a new method to examine the performance evaluation of mutual funds in incomplete markets. Based on the no arbitrage condition, we develop bounds on admissible performance measures. We suggest new ways of ranking mutual funds and provide a diagnostic instrument for evaluating...

This study examines 16 models of monthly Value-at-Risk (VaR) for three equity indices with an emphasis on the filtered historical simulation (FHS) technique. We investigate the importance of historical simulation versus a parametrized approach, the presence of filter versus a static modeling of...

Let X be a n×p real matrix with coherence μ(X)=maxj≠j′|XjtXj′|. We present a simplified and improved study of the quasi-isometry property for most submatrices of X obtained by uniform column sampling. Our results depend on μ(X), the operator norm ‖X‖ and the dimensions with explicit...

We show how to use asset market data to restrict the admissible region for the first-order autocorrelation of the stochastic discount factor (SDF). We interpret this statistic as a measure of a model’s economic time variation across two periods. Estimating bounds for nominal and real SDFs at...

We apply a quadratic hedging scheme developed by Föllmer, Schweizer, and Sondermann to European contingent products whose underlying asset is modeled using a GARCH process and show that local risk-minimizing strategies with respect to the physical measure do exist, even though an associated...

Numerous empirical proofs indicate the adequacy of the time discrete auto-regressive stochastic volatility models introduced by Taylor in the description of the log-returns of financial assets. The pricing and hedging of contingent products that use these models for their underlying assets is a...