A common practice in evidence-based decision-making uses estimates of conditional probabilities P(y|x) obtained from research studies to predict outcomes y on the basis of observed covariates x. Given this information, decisions are then based on the predicted outcomes. Researchers commonly...

There are over 3 billion searches globally on Google every day. This report examines whether Google search queries can be used to predict the present and the near future unemployment rate in Finland. Predicting the present and the near future is of interest, as the official records of the state...

This report examines whether Google search queries can be used to predict the present and the near future house prices in Finland. Compared to a simple benchmark model, Google searches improve the prediction of the present house price index by 7.5 % measured by mean absolute error. In addition,...

Brand distribution and promotional decisions require store-level forecasts for Brand sales. This may be accomplished by developing individual store-level models using store-level sales and promotional data. The disadvantage in this is that the number of models could run into hundreds. Also,...

This study reconsiders the role of jumps for volatility forecasting by showing that jumps have a positive and mostly significant impact on future volatility. This result becomes apparent once volatility is separated into its continuous and discontinuous component using estimators which are not...

The prototypical Lee-Carter mortality model is characterized by a single common time factor that loads differently across age groups. In this paper, we propose a parametric factor model for the term structure of mortality where multiple factors are designed to influence the age groups...

The importance of solar energy has been growing in recent years. This raises the need for efficient modelling and forecasting methods. The existing methods are predominantly based on weather predictions or forecast solar radiation, which is not easy to convert into production forecast. Instead...

We introduce the vector-valued t-Riesz distribution for time series models of electricity prices. The t-Riesz distribution extends the well-known Multivariate Student's t distribution by allowing for tail heterogeneity via a vector of degrees of freedom (DoF) parameters. The closed-form density...

Mathematical forecasting approaches can lead to reliable demand forecast in some environments by extrapolating regular patterns in time-series. However, unpredictable events that do not appear in historical data can reduce the usefulness of mathematical forecasts for demand planning purposes....

In this paper we focus on the analysis of the effect of prediction and estimation risk on the loss distribution, risk measures and economic capital. When variables for the determination of probability of default and loss distribution have to be predicted because they are not available at the...