We investigate the effect of the 20 largest – in terms of insured losses – man-made or natural disasters on the insurance industry. We show via an event study that insurance markets worldwide are quite resilient to unexpected losses to capital and are even outperforming the general market...

In this paper we compare data from BTA deep-hole drilling experiments conducted according to an experimental design, which had to be repeated due to the development of spiralling in all experiments in the first repetition. We compare the time series of the drilling torque and the bending moment...

Several recent developments in nonparametric regression are based on the concept of data approximation: They aim at finding the simplest model that is an adequate approximation to the data. Approximations are regarded as adequate iff the residuals ?look like noise?. This is usually checked with...

If a model is fitted to empirical data, bias can arise from terms which are not incorporated in the model assumptions. As a consequence the commonly used optimality criteria based on the generalized variance of the estimate of the model parameters may not lead to efficient designs for the...

This paper assesses the dynamics of treatment effects arising from variation in the duration of training. We use German administrative data that have the extraordinary feature that the amount of treatment varies continuously from 10 days to 395 days (i.e. 13 months). This feature allows us to...

Support Vector Machines (SVMs) have become a popular learning algorithm, in particular for large, high-dimensional classification problems. SVMs have been shown to give most accurate classification results in a variety of applications. Several methods have been proposed to obtain not only a...

The aim of this analysis is the demonstration that the high and the low musical register (Soprano, Alto vs. Tenor, Bass) can be identified by timbre, i.e. after pitch information is eliminated from the spectrum. This is achieved by means of pitch free characteristics of spectral densities of...

This paper develops a tractable dynamic microeconomic model of migration decisions that is aggregated to describe the behavior of interregional migration. Our structural approach allows us to deal with dynamic self-selection problems that arise from the endogeneity of location choice and the...

We discuss filtering procedures for robust extraction of a signal from noisy time series. Moving averages and running medians are standard methods for this, but they have shortcomings when large spikes (outliers) respectively trends occur. Modified trimmed means and linear median hybrid filters...

The performance of an algorithm often largely depends on some hyper parameter which should be optimized before its usage. Since most conventional optimization methods suffer from some drawbacks, we developed an alternative way to find the best hyper parameter values. Contrary to the well known...