Application of Stationary Wavelet Support Vector Machines for the Prediction of Economic Recessions

This paper examines the efficiency of various approaches on the classification and prediction of economic expansion and recession periods in United Kingdom. Four approaches are applied. The first is discrete choice models using Logit and Probit regressions, while the second approach is a Markov Switching Regime (MSR) Model with Time-Varying Transition Probabilities. The third approach refers on Support Vector Machines (SVM), while the fourth approach proposed in this study is a Stationary Wavelet SVM modelling. The findings show that SW-SVM and MSR present the best forecasting performance, in the out-of sample period. In addition, the forecasts for period 2012-2015 are provided using all approaches

Financial Soundness Prediction Using a Multi-classification Model: Evidence from Current Financial Crisis in OECD Banks

The paper aims to develop an early warning model that separates previously rated banks (337 Fitch-rated banks from OECD) into three classes, based on their financial health and using a one-year window. The early warning system is based on a classification model which estimates the Fitch ratings using Bankscope bankspecific data, regulatory and macroeconomic data as input variables. The authors propose a “hybridization technique” that combines the Extreme learning machine and the Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique. Due to the imbalanced nature of the problem, the authors apply an oversampling technique on the data aiming to improve the classification results on the minority groups. The methodology proposed outperforms other existing classification techniques used to predict bank solvency. It proved essential in improving average accuracy and especially the performance of the minority groups

An Adaptive Neural Network Approach To Predict The Capital Adequacy Ratio

Financial institutions, policy makers and regulatory authorities need to implement stress tests in order to test both resilience and the consequences of adverse shocks. The European Central Bank and the European Banking Authority regularly conduct these tests, whose importance is more and more evident after the financial crisis of 2007-2008. The stress tests’ nonlinear features of variables and scenarios triggered the need of general and robust strategies to perform this task. In this paper we want to introduce an adaptive Neural Network approach to predict the Capital Adequacy Ratio (CAR), which is one of the main ratios monitored to retrieve useful information along many stress test procedures. The Neural Network approach is based on a comparison between feed-forward and recurrent networks, and is run after a meaningful pre-processing operations definition. Results show that our approach is able to successfully predict CAR by using both Neural Networks and recurrent networks

Three essays on the use of neural networks for financial prediction

The number of studies trying to explain the causes and consequences of the economic and financial crises usually rises considerably after a banking crisis occurs. The dramatic effects of the most recent financial crisis on the real economy around the world call for a better comprehension of previous crises as a way to anticipate future crisis episodes. It is precisely this objective, preventing future crises, the main motivation of this PhD dissertation. We identify two important mechanisms that have failed during the latest years and that are closely related to the onset of the financial crisis: The assessment of the solvency of banks along with the systemic risk over the time, and the detection of the macroeconomic imbalances in some countries, especially in Europe, which made the financial crisis evolve through a sovereign crisis. Our dissertation is made up of three different essays, trying to go a step ahead in the knowledge of these mechanisms.Departamento de Economía Financiera y ContabilidadDoctorado en Economía de la Empres

Artificial Intelligence in Asset Management

Artificial intelligence (AI) has grown in presence in asset management and has revolutionized the sector in many ways

Empirical Analysis of Natural Gas Markets

Recent developments in the natural gas industry warrant new analysis of related issues. Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investments have accelerated the shift away from coal as the dominant source of electricity. Its low environmental impact, reduced volume, and broad availability make liquefied natural gas (LNG) a popular alternative, during this time of transition between traditional fuels and newer options. In the United States, the shale gas revolution has made natural gas a game changer. In this book, we focus on empirical analyses of the natural gas market and its growing relevance worldwide

Data Science for Finance: Targeted Learning from (Big) Data to Economic Stability and Financial Risk Management

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Information Management, specialization in Statistics and EconometricsThe modelling, measurement, and management of systemic financial stability remains a critical issue in most countries. Policymakers, regulators, and managers depend on complex models for financial stability and risk management. The models are compelled to be robust, realistic, and consistent with all relevant available data. This requires great data disclosure, which is deemed to have the highest quality standards. However, stressed situations, financial crises, and pandemics are the source of many new risks with new requirements such as new data sources and different models. This dissertation aims to show the data quality challenges of high-risk situations such as pandemics or economic crisis and it try to theorize the new machine learning models for predictive and longitudes time series models. In the first study (Chapter Two) we analyzed and compared the quality of official datasets available for COVID-19 as a best practice for a recent high-risk situation with dramatic effects on financial stability. We used comparative statistical analysis to evaluate the accuracy of data collection by a national (Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention) and two international (World Health Organization; European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control) organizations based on the value of systematic measurement errors. We combined excel files, text mining techniques, and manual data entries to extract the COVID-19 data from official reports and to generate an accurate profile for comparisons. The findings show noticeable and increasing measurement errors in the three datasets as the pandemic outbreak expanded and more countries contributed data for the official repositories, raising data comparability concerns and pointing to the need for better coordination and harmonized statistical methods. The study offers a COVID-19 combined dataset and dashboard with minimum systematic measurement errors and valuable insights into the potential problems in using databanks without carefully examining the metadata and additional documentation that describe the overall context of data. In the second study (Chapter Three) we discussed credit risk as the most significant source of risk in banking as one of the most important sectors of financial institutions. We proposed a new machine learning approach for online credit scoring which is enough conservative and robust for unstable and high-risk situations. This Chapter is aimed at the case of credit scoring in risk management and presents a novel method to be used for the default prediction of high-risk branches or customers. This study uses the Kruskal-Wallis non-parametric statistic to form a conservative credit-scoring model and to study its impact on modeling performance on the benefit of the credit provider. The findings show that the new credit scoring methodology represents a reasonable coefficient of determination and a very low false-negative rate. It is computationally less expensive with high accuracy with around 18% improvement in Recall/Sensitivity. Because of the recent perspective of continued credit/behavior scoring, our study suggests using this credit score for non-traditional data sources for online loan providers to allow them to study and reveal changes in client behavior over time and choose the reliable unbanked customers, based on their application data. This is the first study that develops an online non-parametric credit scoring system, which can reselect effective features automatically for continued credit evaluation and weigh them out by their level of contribution with a good diagnostic ability. In the third study (Chapter Four) we focus on the financial stability challenges faced by insurance companies and pension schemes when managing systematic (undiversifiable) mortality and longevity risk. For this purpose, we first developed a new ensemble learning strategy for panel time-series forecasting and studied its applications to tracking respiratory disease excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic. The layered learning approach is a solution related to ensemble learning to address a given predictive task by different predictive models when direct mapping from inputs to outputs is not accurate. We adopt a layered learning approach to an ensemble learning strategy to solve the predictive tasks with improved predictive performance and take advantage of multiple learning processes into an ensemble model. In this proposed strategy, the appropriate holdout for each model is specified individually. Additionally, the models in the ensemble are selected by a proposed selection approach to be combined dynamically based on their predictive performance. It provides a high-performance ensemble model to automatically cope with the different kinds of time series for each panel member. For the experimental section, we studied more than twelve thousand observations in a portfolio of 61-time series (countries) of reported respiratory disease deaths with monthly sampling frequency to show the amount of improvement in predictive performance. We then compare each country’s forecasts of respiratory disease deaths generated by our model with the corresponding COVID-19 deaths in 2020. The results of this large set of experiments show that the accuracy of the ensemble model is improved noticeably by using different holdouts for different contributed time series methods based on the proposed model selection method. These improved time series models provide us proper forecasting of respiratory disease deaths for each country, exhibiting high correlation (0.94) with Covid-19 deaths in 2020. In the fourth study (Chapter Five) we used the new ensemble learning approach for time series modeling, discussed in the previous Chapter, accompany by K-means clustering for forecasting life tables in COVID-19 times. Stochastic mortality modeling plays a critical role in public pension design, population and public health projections, and in the design, pricing, and risk management of life insurance contracts and longevity-linked securities. There is no general method to forecast the mortality rate applicable to all situations especially for unusual years such as the COVID-19 pandemic. In this Chapter, we investigate the feasibility of using an ensemble of traditional and machine learning time series methods to empower forecasts of age-specific mortality rates for groups of countries that share common longevity trends. We use Generalized Age-Period-Cohort stochastic mortality models to capture age and period effects, apply K-means clustering to time series to group countries following common longevity trends, and use ensemble learning to forecast life expectancy and annuity prices by age and sex. To calibrate models, we use data for 14 European countries from 1960 to 2018. The results show that the ensemble method presents the best robust results overall with minimum RMSE in the presence of structural changes in the shape of time series at the time of COVID-19. In this dissertation’s conclusions (Chapter Six), we provide more detailed insights about the overall contributions of this dissertation on the financial stability and risk management by data science, opportunities, limitations, and avenues for future research about the application of data science in finance and economy

Machine Learning and Traditional Econometric Models: A Systematic Mapping Study

This research has been supported by the project "INTELFIN: Artificial Intelligence for investment and value creation in SMEs through competitive analysis and business environment", Reference: RTC-2017-6536-7, funded by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (ChallengesCollaboration 2017), the State Agency for Research (AEI) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).Machine Learning (ML) is a disruptive concept that has given rise to and generated interest in different applications in many fields of study. The purpose of Machine Learning is to solve real-life problems by automatically learning and improving from experience without being explicitly programmed for a specific problem, but for a generic type of problem. This article approaches the different applications of ML in a series of econometric methods. Objective: The objective of this research is to identify the latest applications and do a comparative study of the performance of econometric and ML models. The study aimed to find empirical evidence for the performance of ML algorithms being superior to traditional econometric models. The Methodology of systematic mapping of literature has been followed to carry out this research, according to the guidelines established by [39], and [58] that facilitate the identification of studies published about this subject. Results: The results show, that in most cases ML outperforms econometric models, while in other cases the best performance has been achieved by combining traditional methods and ML applications. Conclusion: inclusion and exclusions criteria have been applied and 52 articles closely related articles have been reviewed. The conclusion drawn from this research is that it is a field that is growing, which is something that is well known nowadays and that there is no certainty as to the performance of ML being always superior to that of econometric models.project "INTELFIN: Artificial Intelligence for investment and value creation in SMEs through competitive analysis and business environment" - Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (ChallengesCollaboration 2017) RTC-2017-6536-7State Agency for Research (AEI)European Commissio