When comparing methods for classification, often the rating relies on their prediction accuracy alone. One reason for this is that this is the aspect that can be most easily measured. Yet, often one wants to learn more about the problem than only how to predict. The interpretation of the...

Cycles play an important role when analyzing market phenomena. In many markets, both overlaying (weekly, seasonal or business cycles) and time-varying cycles (e.g. asymmetric lengths of peak and off peak or variation of business cycle length) exist simultaneously. Identification of these market...

When analyzing business cycle data, one observes that the relevant predictor variables are often highly correlated. This paper presents a method to obtain measures of importance for the classification of data in which such multicollinearity is present. In systems with highly correlated variables...

This paper analyses the influence of 13 stylized facts of the German economy on the West German business cycles from 1955 to 1994. The method used in this investigation is Statistical Experimental Design with orthogonal factors. We are looking for all existing Plackett-Burman designs realizable...

We investigate the combination of the dimension reduction methods SIR (Li, 1991) and DAME (Gather et al., 2001) with fuzzy-clustering to validate a given classification. We consider certain economic variables which are assumed to contain the information relevant to determine the current phase of...