The Amazon rainforest is one of the world’s greatest natural wonders and holds great importance and significance for the world’s environmental balance. Around 60% of the Amazon rainforest is located in the Brazilian territory. The two biggest states of the Amazon region are...

A government’s ability to forecast key economic fundamentals accurately can affect business confidence, consumer sentiment, and foreign direct investment, among others. A government forecast based on an econometric model is replicable, whereas one that is not fully based on an econometric...

Nonlinear regression models have been widely used in practice for a variety of time series and cross-section datasets. For purposes of analyzing univariate and multivariate time series data, in particular, Smooth Transition Regression (STR) models have been shown to be very useful for...

The El Niños Southern Oscillations (ENSO) is a periodical phenomenon of climatic interannual variability which could be measured through either the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) or the Sea Surface Temperature (SST) Index. The main purpose of this paper is to analyze these two indexes in...

When dealing with market risk under the Basel II Accord, variation pays in the form of lower capital requirements and higher profits. Typically, GARCH type models are chosen to forecast Value-at-Risk (VaR) using a single risk model. In this paper we illustrate two useful variations to the...

In the dual bin packing problem, the objective is to assign items of given size to the largest possible number of bins, subject to the constraint that the total size of the items assigned to any bin is at least equal to 1. We carry out a probabilistic analysis of this problem under the...

Experts often add domain knowledge to model-based forecasts while aiming to reduce forecast errors. Indeed, there is some empirical evidence that expert-adjusted forecasts improve forecast quality. However, surprisingly little is known about what experts actually do. Based on a large and...

This paper conjectures that the behaviour of experts who adjust statistical-model-based forecasts obeys the Law of Small Numbers [LSN]. To put this hypothesis to an empirical test, I propose a simple but effective methodology. It is applied to a database containing information on many experts...

The brand choice problem in marketing has recently been addressed with methods from computational intelligence such as neural networks. Another class of methods from computational intelligence, the so-called ensemble methods such as boosting and stacking have never been applied to the brand...

In this paper we give a short novel proof of the well-known Lagrange multiplier rule, discuss the sources of the power of this rule and consider several applications of this rule. The new proof does not use the implicit function theorem and combines the advantages of two of the most well-known...