In many economic applications it is desirable to make future predictions about the financial status of a company. The focus of predictions is mainly if a company will default or not. A support vector machine (SVM) is one learning method which uses historical data to establish a classification...

Predicting default probabilities is at the core of credit risk management and is becoming more and more important for banks in order to measure their client's degree of risk, and for firms to operate successfully. The SVM with evolutionary feature selection is applied to the CreditReform...

The paper contributes to the rare literature modeling term structure of crude oil markets. We explain term structure of crude oil prices using dynamic Nelson-Siegel model, and propose to forecast them with the generalized regression framework based on neural networks. The newly proposed...

There is an increasing awareness of the potential of nonlinear modeling in regional science, which can partly be explained by the recognition of the limitations of conventional equilibrium models in complex situationsand partly by the easy availability and accessibility of sophisticated...

Identification of subgroups of patients for which treatment A is more effective than treatment B, and vice versa, is of key importance to the development of personalized medicine. Several tree-based algorithms have been developed for the detection of such treatment-subgroup interactions. In many...

In multinomial processing tree (MPT) models, individual differences between the participants in a study lead to heterogeneity of the model parameters. While subject covariates may explain these differences, it is often unknown in advance how the parameters depend on the available covariates,...

Recursive partitioning techniques are established and frequently applied for exploring unknown structures in complex and possibly high-dimensional data sets. The methods can be used to detect interactions and nonlinear structures in a data-driven way by recursively splitting the predictor space...

This paper discusses a tool for optimization of econometric models based on genetic algorithms. First, we briefly describe the concept of this optimization technique. Then, we explain the design of a specifically developed algorithm and apply it to a difficult econometric problem, the...

Graphical data representation is an important tool for model selection in bankruptcy analysis since the problem is highly non-linear and its numericalrepresentation is much less transparent. In classical rating models a convenientrepresentation of ratings in a closed form is possible reducing...

In recent years, support vector regressions (SVRs), a novel artificial neural network (ANN) technique, has been successfully used as a nonparametric tool for regression estimation and forecasting time series data. In this thesis, we deal with the application of SVRs in financial markets...