Banks are concerned with the assessment of the risk of financial distress before giving out a loan. Many researchers proposed the use of models based on the Neural Networks in order to help the banker better make a decision. The objective of this paper is to explore a new practical way based on...

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a common procedure for the analysis of financial market data, such as implied volatility smiles or interest rate curves. Recently, Pelsser and Lord [11] raised the question whether PCA results may not be 'facts but artefacts'. We extend this line of research...