Without doubt modern education in statistics must involve practical, computer-based data analysis but the question arises whether and how computational elements should be integrated into the canon of methodological education. Should the student see and study high-level programming code right at...

We propose marginal integration estimation and testing methods for the coefficients of varying coefficient multivariate regression model. Asymptotic distribution theory is developed for the estimation method which enjoys the same rate of convergence as univariate function estimation. For the...

Implied volatility is one of the key issues in modern quantitative finance, since plain vanilla option prices contain vital information for pricing and hedging of exotic and illiquid options. European plain vanilla options are nowadays widely traded, which results in a great amount of...

State price densities (SPD) are an important element in applied quantitativefinance. In a Black-Scholes model they are lognormal distributions with constant volatility parameter. In practice volatility changes and the distribution deviates from log-normality. We estimate SPDs using EUREX option...

Most dimension reduction methods based on nonparametric smoothing are highlysensitive to outliers and to data coming from heavy-tailed distributions. We showthat the recently proposed methods by Xia et al. (2002) can be made robust insuch a way that preserves all advantages of the original...

How can we measure and compare the relative performance of production units?If input and output variables are one dimensional, then the simplest way is tocompute efficiency by calculating and comparing the ratio of output and inputfor each production unit. This idea is inappropriate though, when...

Trading, hedging and risk analysis of complex option portfolios depend on accurate pricing models. The modelling of implied volatilities (IV) plays an important role, since volatility is the crucial parameter in the Black-Scholes (BS) pricing formula. It is well known from empirical studies that...

The Black-Scholes formula, one of the major breakthroughs of modern finance,allows for an easy and fast computation of option prices. But some of its assumptions, like constant volatility or log-normal distribution of asset prices,do not find justification in the markets. More complex models,...

An enormous number of statistical methods have been developed in quantitivefinance during the last decades. Nonparametric methods, bootstrapping timeseries, wavelets, estimation of diffusion coefficients are now almost standard instatistical applications. To implement these new methods the...

The purpose of this work is to introduce one of the most promising among recentlydeveloped statistical techniques – the support vector machine (SVM) –to corporate bankruptcy analysis. An SVM is implemented for analysing suchpredictors as financial ratios. A method of adapting it to default...