Three specific models are investigated: (1) diversion and k distinct falsifications (k + 1 degrees of freedom); (2) diversion and the accumulation of all the falsifications (2 degrees of freedom); (3) diversion only (1 degree of freedom). A test statistic has been derived for models (1) and (2)...

The International Coal Statistics Data Base (ICSD) is a microcomputer-based system which contains information related to international coal trade. This includes coal production, consumption, imports and exports information. The ICSD is a secondary data base, meaning that information contained...

In non-parametric function estimation, providing a confidence band with the right coverage is a challenging problem. This is especially the case when the underlying function has a wide range of unknown degrees of smoothness. Here we propose two methods of constructing an average coverage...

Machine learning has become one of the most active and exciting areas of computer science research, in large part because of its wide-spread applicability to problems as diverse as natural language processing, speech recognition, spam detection, search, computer vision, gene discovery, medical...

Financial markets in emerging countries are volatile and imperfect, so pricing model under traditional perfect-market frameset may not give reliable price of financial derivatives. The most famous pricing model for stock index future is the cost of carry model. The mis-pricing of cost of carry...

The standard theory of the stochastic models used to value financial derivatives contracts involves models whose input parameters are deterministic functions and often constants. Because of the random nature of the changes in the market prices of the financial instruments, the coefficients of...

In this thesis we address problems associated with financial modelling from a Bayesian point of view. Specifically, we look at the problem of calibrating financial models, measuring the model uncertainty of a claim and choosing an optimal hedging strategy. Throughout the study, the local...

Shrinkage estimation of the covariance matrix of asset returns was introduced to the finance profession several years ago. Since then, the approach has also received considerable attention in various life science studies, as a remedial measure for covariance matrix estimation with insufficient...

The basic principles and equations are developed for elementary finance, based on the concept of compound interest. The five quantities of interest in such problems are present value, future value, amount of periodic payment, number of periods and the rate of interest per period. We consider...