We propose a new information theoretically based optimization criterion for the estimation of mixture density models and compare it with other methods based on maximum likelihood and maximum a posterio estimation. For the optimization, we employ an evolutionary algorithm which estimates both...

When comparing methods for classification, often the rating relies on their prediction accuracy alone. One reason for this is that this is the aspect that can be most easily measured. Yet, often one wants to learn more about the problem than only how to predict. The interpretation of the...

We use Dynamic Bayesian networks to classify business cycle phases. We compare classifiers generated by learning the Dynamic Bayesian network structure on different sets of admissible network structures. Included are sets of network structures of the Tree Augmented Naive Bayes (TAN) classifiers...

We describe a computer intensive method for linear dimension reduction which minimizes the classification error directly. Simulated annealing Bohachevsky et al (1986) is used to solve this problem. The classification error is determined by an exact integration. We avoid distance or scatter...

In this paper, we examine the German business cycle (from 1955 to 1994) in order to identify univariate and multivariate outliers as well as influence points corresponding to Linear Discriminant Analysis. The locations of the corresponding observations are compared and economically interpreted.

We present a descriptive analysis of stylized facts for the German business cycle. We demonstrate that simple ad-hoc instructions for identifying univariate rules characterizing the German business cycle 1955-1994 lead to an error rate comparable to standard multivariate methods.

The properties of Cpmk in the presence of asymmetric specification limits are discussed. It is shown that Cpmk tends to zero as the process variation increases and vice versa. Furthermore, if the process variation is small, Cpmk has its maximum near the target value but the maximum moves towards...

Sometimes one may be confronted with classification problems where classes are constituted of several subclasses that possess different distributions and therefore destroy accurate models of the entire classes as one similar group. An issue is modelling via local models of several subclasses. In...