We present a model for hourly electricity load forecasting based on stochastically time-varying processes that are designed to account for changes in customer behaviour and in utility production efficiencies. The model is periodic: it consists of different equations and different parameters for...

We consider likelihood inference and state estimation by means of importance sampling for state space models with a nonlinear non-Gaussian observation y ~ p(y lpha) and a linear Gaussian state alpha ~ p(alpha). The importance density is chosen to be the Laplace approximation of the smoothing...

In this paper, we provide evidence that fat tails and stochastic volatility can be important in improving in-sample fit and out-of-sample forecasting performance. Specifically, we construct a VAR model where the orthogonalised shocks feature Student's t distribution and time-varying variance. We...

We investigate changes in the time series characteristics of postwar U.S. inflation. In a model-based analysis the conditional mean of inflation is specified by a long memory autoregressive fractionally integrated moving average process and the conditional variance is modelled by a stochastic...

We model 1981-2002 annual US default frequencies for a panel of firms in different rating and age classes. The data is decomposed into a systematic and firm-specific risk component, where the systematic component reflects the general economic conditions and default climate. We have to cope with...

We investigate changes in the time series characteristics of postwar U.S. inflation. In a model-based analysis the conditional mean of inflation is specified by a long memory autoregressive fractionally integrated moving average process and the conditional variance is modelled by a stochastic...

A review is given of parametric estimation methods for discretely sampled multivariate diffusion processes. The main focus is on estimating functions and asymptotic results. Maximum likelihood estimation is briefly considered, but the emphasis is on computationally less demanding martingale...

The efficient importance sampling (EIS) method is a general principle for the numerical evaluation of high-dimensional integrals that uses the sequential structure of target integrands to build variance minimising importance samplers. Despite a number of successful applications in high...