Typically survey data have responses with gaps, outliers and ties, and the distributions of the responses might be skewed. Usually, in small area estimation, predictive inference is done using a two-stage Bayesian model with normality at both levels (responses and area means).This is the...

This paper is concerned with the estimation of forecast error, particularly in relation to insurance loss reserving. Forecast error is generally regarded as consisting of three components, namely parameter, process and model errors. The first two of these components, and their estimation, are...

This paper examines the asymptotic behavior of the posterior distribution of a possibly nondifferentiable function g(theta), where theta is a finite-dimensional parameter of either a parametric or semiparametric model. The main assumption is that the distribution of a suitable estimator theta_n,...

This note presents the R package bayesGARCH (Ardia, 2007) which provides functions for the Bayesian estimation of the parsimonious and effective GARCH(1,1) model with Student-t innovations. The estimation procedure is fully automatic and thus avoids the tedious task of tuning a MCMC sampling...

We propose a generic Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm to speed up computations for datasets with many observations. A key feature of our approach is the use of the highly efficient difference estimator from the survey sampling literature to estimate the log-likelihood accurately using...