Are emerging economies implementing inflation targeting (IT) with a perfectly flexible exchange-rate arrangement, as developed economies do, or have these countries developed their own IT framework? This paper offers a new method for assessing exchange-rate policies that combines the use of...

We introduce a weak hidden Markov model (WHMM) in an attempt to capture more accurately the evolution of a risky asset. The log returns of assets are modulated by a weak or higher-order Markov chain with finite-state space. In particular, the optimal estimates of the second-order Markov chain...

An approach is proposed for initializing the expectation–maximization (EM) algorithm in multivariate Gaussian mixture models with an unknown number of components. As the EM algorithm is often sensitive to the choice of the initial parameter vector, efficient initialization is an important...

In this article, the author proposes an unsupervised grayscale image segmentation method based on a combination of the Firefly Algorithm and the Gaussian Mixture Model. Firstly, the Firefly Algorithm has been applied in a histogram-based research of cluster centroids. The Firefly Algorithm is a...

When evaluating residential energy systems like co-generation systems, hot water and electricity demand profiles are critical. In this paper, the authors aim to extract basic time-series demand patterns from two kinds of measured demand (electricity and domestic hot water), and also aim to...

In multiple-output quantile regression the simultaneous study of multiple response variables requires multivariate quantiles. Current definitions of such quantiles often lack a clear probability interpretation, as the defined quantiles can cover large parts of the distribution where little...

The purpose of this study is to investigate and compare the popularity of common grocery apps in Hungary as well as Iran. The data were gathered from Iranian and Hungarian users who had at least one online purchase experience using a grocery app. A Gaussian mixture model (GMM) and multi-layer...