The growing complexity of many real world problems is one of the biggest challenges of our time. The area of international finance is one prominent example where decision making is often fraud to mistakes, and tasks such as forecasting, trading and hedging exchange rates seem to be too difficult...

This paper considers factor estimation from heterogenous data, where some of the variables are noisy and only weakly informative for the factors. To identify the irrelevant variables, we search for zero rows in the loadings matrix of the factor model. To sharply separate these irrelevant...