Risk management and the thorough understanding of the relations between financial markets and the standard theory of macroeconomics have always been among the topics most addressed by researchers, both financial mathematicians and economists. This work aims at explaining investors' behavior from...

Graphical data representation is an important tool for model selection in bankruptcy analysis since the problem is highly non-linear and its numerical representation is much less transparent. In classical rating models a convenient representation of ratings in a closed form is possible reducing...

Modern computing equipment is present at schools and universities at all levels of education. In the statistical sciences computers offer great opportunities to enrich the learning process by the means of e.g. animations, software integration or on-the-fly computations.A personal review of...

Econometrics often deals with data under, from the statistical point of view, non-standard conditions such as heteroscedasticity or measurement errors and the estimation methods need thus be either adopted to such conditions or be at least insensitive to them. The methods insensitive to...

One of the major cost factors in car manufacturing is the painting of body and other parts such as wing or bonnet. Surprisingly, the painting may be even more expensive than the body itself. From this point of view it is clear that car manufacturers need to observe the painting process carefully...

Recently, Diebold and Li (2003) obtained good forecasting results for yield curves in a reparametrized Nelson-Siegel framework. We analyze similar modeling approaches for price curves of variance swaps that serve nowadays as hedging instruments for options on realized variance.We consider the...

Predicting default probabilities is important for firms and banks to operate successfully and to estimate their specific risks. There are many reasons to use nonlinear techniques for predicting bankruptcy from financial ratios. Here we propose the so called Support Vector Machine (SVM) to...

Measuring dependence in a multivariate time series is tantamount to modelling its dynamic structure in space and time. In the context of a multivariate normally distributed time series, the evolution of the covariance (or correlation) matrix over time describes this dynamic. A wide variety of...

This book is the third volume of the Handbook of Computational Statistics and covers the field of Data Visualization. In line with the companion volumes, it contains a collection of chapters by experts in the field to present readers with an up-to-date and comprehensive overview of the state of...