Marketing problems often involve inary classification of customers into ``buyers'' versus ``non-buyers'' or ``prefers brand A'' versus ``prefers brand B''. These cases require binary classification models such as logistic regression, linear, and quadratic discriminant analysis. A promising...

To minimize the primal support vector machine (SVM) problem, we propose to use iterative majorization. To do so, we propose to use it- erative majorization. To allow for nonlinearity of the predictors, we use (non)monotone spline transformations. An advantage over the usual ker- nel approach in...

Support vector machines (SVM) are becoming increasingly popular for the prediction of a binary dependent variable. SVMs perform very well with respect to competing techniques. Often, the solution of an SVM is obtained by switching to the dual. In this paper, we stick to the primal support vector...

Consider the classification task of assigning a test object to one of two or more possible groups, or classes. An intuitive way to proceed is to assign the object to that class, to which the distance is minimal. As a distance measure to a class, we propose here to use the distance to the convex...

We propose to estimate the parameters of the Market Share Attraction Model (Cooper & Nakanishi, 1988; Fok & Franses, 2004) in a novel way by using a non-parametric technique for function estimation called Support Vector Regressions (SVR) (Vapnik, 1995; Smola, 1996). Traditionally, the parameters of the...

A new classification method is proposed, called Support Hy- perplanes (SHs). To solve the binary classification task, SHs consider the set of all hyperplanes that do not make classification mistakes, referred to as semi-consistent hyperplanes. A test object is classified using that...

This article proposes a modified method for the construction of diffusion indexes in macroeconomic forecasting using principal component regres- sion. The method aims to maximize the amount of variance of the origi- nal predictor variables retained by the diffusion indexes, by matching the data...

Multiplicative interaction models, such as Goodman's RC(M) association models, can be a useful tool for analyzing the content of interaction effects. However, most models for interaction effects are only suitable for data sets with two or three predictor variables. Here, we discuss an optimal...

One of the many areas in which Correspondence Analysis (CA) is an effective method, concerns ordination problems. For example, CA is a well-known technique for the seriation of archaeological assemblages. A problem with the CA seriation solution, however, is that only a relative ordering of the...

Forecasting with many predictors is of interest, for instance, in macroeconomics and finance. This paper compares two methods for dealing with many predictors, that is, principal component regression (PCR) and principal covariate regression (PCovR). The forecast performance of these methods is...