Without doubt modern education in statistics must involve practical, computer-based data analysis but the question arises whether and how computational elements should be integrated into the canon of methodological education. Should the student see and study high-level programming code right at...

Risk management technology applied to high dimensional portfolios needs simple and fast methods for calculation of Value-at-Risk (VaR). The multivariate normal framework provides a simple off-the-shelf methodology but lacks the heavy tailed distributional properties that are observed in data. A...

Option pricing models are calibrated to market data of plain vanillas by minimization of an error functional. From the economic viewpoint, there are several possibilities to measure the error between the market and the model. These different specifications of the error give rise to different...

The calibration of option pricing models leads to the minimization of an error functional. We show that its usual specification as a root mean squared error implies fluctuating exotics prices and possibly wrong prices. We propose a simple and natural method to overcome these problems, illustrate...

The Value-at-Risk calculation reduces the dimensionality of the risk factor space. The main reasons for such simplifications are, e.g., technical efficiency, the logic and statistical appropriateness of the model. In Chapter 2 we present three simple mappings: the mapping on the market index,...

Functional principal component analysis (FPCA) based on the Karhunen-Loève decomposition has been successfully applied in many applications, mainly for one sample problems. In this paper we consider common functional principal components for two sample problems. Our research is motivated not...

The implied volatility of a European option as a function of strike price and time to maturity forms a volatility surface. Traders price according to the dynamics of this high dimensional surface. Recent developments that employ semiparametric models approximate the implied volatility surface...

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...

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...