This paper is about S-estimation for penalized regression splines. Penalized regression splines are one of the currently most used methods for smoothing noisy data. The estimation method used for fitting such a penalized regression spline model is mostly based on least squares methods, which are...

Bagging has been found to be successful in increasing the predictive performance of unstable classifiers. Bagging draws bootstrap samples from the training sample, applies the classifier to each bootstrap sample, and then averages overal lobtained classification rules. The idea of trimmed...

Using support vector machines for classification problems has the advantage that the curse of dimensionality is circumvented. However, it has been shown that even here a reduction of the dimension of the input space leads to better results. For this purpose, we propose two information criteria...

Economic sentiment surveys are carried out by all European Union member states on a monthly basis. The survey outcomes are used to obtain early insight into future economic evolutions and often receive extensive press coverage. Based on these surveys, the European Commission constructs an...

A time series is said to Granger cause another series if it has incremental predictive power when forecasting it. While Granger causality tests have been studied extensively in the univariate setting, much less is known for the multivariate case. In this paper we propose multivariate...

This study examines key default determinants of fintech loans, using loan-level data from the LendingClub consumer platform during 2007–2018. We identify a robust set of contractual loan characteristics, borrower characteristics, and macroeconomic variables that are important in determining...

It is often believed that the consumer sentiment index has predictive power for future consumption levels. While Granger causality tests have already been used to test for this, no attempt has been made yet to quantify the predictive power of the consumer sentiment index over different time...