Most financial and investment decisions are based on considerations of possible future changes and require forecasts on the evolution of the financial world. Time series and processes are the natural tools for describing the dynamic behavior of financial data, leading to the required forecasts....

The behavior of the implied volatility surface for European options was analysed in detail by Zumbach and Fernandez for prices computed with a new option pricing scheme based on the construction of the risk-neutral measure for realistic processes with a finite time increment. The resulting...