Analyzing imputed financial data: a new approach to cluster analysis

The authors introduce a novel statistical modeling technique to cluster analysis and apply it to financial data. Their two main goals are to handle missing data and to find homogeneous groups within the data. Their approach is flexible and handles large and complex data structures with missing observations and with quantitative and qualitative measurements. The authors achieve this result by mapping the data to a new structure that is free of distributional assumptions in choosing homogeneous groups of observations. Their new method also provides insight into the number of different categories needed for classifying the data. The authors use this approach to partition a matched sample of stocks. One group offers dividend reinvestment plans, and the other does not. Their method partitions this sample with almost 97 percent accuracy even when using only easily available financial variables. One interpretation of their result is that the misclassified companies are the best candidates either to adopt a dividend reinvestment plan (if they have none) or to abandon one (if they currently offer one). The authors offer other suggestions for applications in the field of finance.

EMMIXcskew: an R Package for the Fitting of a Mixture of Canonical Fundamental Skew t-Distributions

This paper presents an R package EMMIXcskew for the fitting of the canonical fundamental skew t-distribution (CFUST) and finite mixtures of this distribution (FM-CFUST) via maximum likelihood (ML). The CFUST distribution provides a flexible family of models to handle non-normal data, with parameters for capturing skewness and heavy-tails in the data. It formally encompasses the normal, t, and skew-normal distributions as special and/or limiting cases. A few other versions of the skew t-distributions are also nested within the CFUST distribution. In this paper, an Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is described for computing the ML estimates of the parameters of the FM-CFUST model, and different strategies for initializing the algorithm are discussed and illustrated. The methodology is implemented in the EMMIXcskew package, and examples are presented using two real datasets. The EMMIXcskew package contains functions to fit the FM-CFUST model, including procedures for generating different initial values. Additional features include random sample generation and contour visualization in 2D and 3D

Multiple Resolution Nonparametric Classifiers

Bayesian discriminant functions provide optimal classification decision boundaries in the sense of minimizing the average error rate. An operational assumption is that the probability density functions for the individual classes are either known a priori or can be estimated from the data through the use of estimating techniques. The use of Parzen- windows is a popular and theoretically sound choice for such estimation. However, while the minimal average error rate can be achieved when combining Bayes Rule with Parzen-window density estimation, the latter is computationally costly to the point where it may lead to unacceptable run-time performance. We present the Multiple Resolution Nonparametric (MRN) classifier as a new approach for significantly reducing the computational cost of using Parzen-window density estimates without sacrificing the virtues of Bayesian discriminant functions. Performance is evaluated against a standard Parzen-window classifier on several common datasets

Statistical Mechanics of Learning: A Variational Approach for Real Data

Using a variational technique, we generalize the statistical physics approach of learning from random examples to make it applicable to real data. We demonstrate the validity and relevance of our method by computing approximate estimators for generalization errors that are based on training data alone.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Bayesian Deep Net GLM and GLMM

Deep feedforward neural networks (DFNNs) are a powerful tool for functional approximation. We describe flexible versions of generalized linear and generalized linear mixed models incorporating basis functions formed by a DFNN. The consideration of neural networks with random effects is not widely used in the literature, perhaps because of the computational challenges of incorporating subject specific parameters into already complex models. Efficient computational methods for high-dimensional Bayesian inference are developed using Gaussian variational approximation, with a parsimonious but flexible factor parametrization of the covariance matrix. We implement natural gradient methods for the optimization, exploiting the factor structure of the variational covariance matrix in computation of the natural gradient. Our flexible DFNN models and Bayesian inference approach lead to a regression and classification method that has a high prediction accuracy, and is able to quantify the prediction uncertainty in a principled and convenient way. We also describe how to perform variable selection in our deep learning method. The proposed methods are illustrated in a wide range of simulated and real-data examples, and the results compare favourably to a state of the art flexible regression and classification method in the statistical literature, the Bayesian additive regression trees (BART) method. User-friendly software packages in Matlab, R and Python implementing the proposed methods are available at https://github.com/VBayesLabComment: 35 pages, 7 figure, 10 table