In the era of Basel II a powerful tool for bankruptcy prognosis is vital for banks. The tool must be precise but also easily adaptable to the bank's objections regarding the relation of false acceptances (Type I error) and false rejections (Type II error). We explore the suitability of Smooth...

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...

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...

In asset pricing, most studies focus on finding new factors such as macroeconomic factors or firm characteristics to explain risk premium. Investigating whether these factors are useful in forecasting stock returns remains active research in the field of finance and computer science. This paper...

This paper will outline the functionality available in the CovRegpy package for actuarial practitioners, wealth managers, fund managers, and portfolio analysts written in Python 3.7. The major contributions of CovRegpy can be found in the CovRegpy_DCC.py, CovRegpy_IFF.py, CovRegpy_RCR.py,...

This paper considers a restriction to non-negative matrix factorization in which at least one matrix factor is stochastic. That is, the elements of the matrix factors are non-negative and the columns of one matrix factor sum to 1. This restriction includes topic models, a popular method for...

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...

We review key aspects of forecasting using nonlinear models. Because economic models are typically misspecified, the resulting forecasts provide only an approximation to the best possible forecast. Although it is in principle possible to obtain superior approximations to the optimal forecast...

We propose a generic workflow for the use of machine learning models to inform decision making and to communicate modelling results with stakeholders. It involves three steps: (1) a comparative model evaluation, (2) a feature importance analysis and (3) statistical inference based on Shapley...