We propose multivariate classification as a statistical tool to describe business cycles. These cycles are often analyzed as a univariate phenomenon in terms of GNP or industrial net production ignoring additional information in other economic variables. Multivariate classification overcomes...

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...

This article comments on a frequency estimator which was proposed by [6] and shows empirically that it exhibits a much larger mean squared error than a well known frequency estimator by [8]. It is demonstrated that by using a heuristical adjustment [2] the performance can be greatly improved....