A Novel Approach to Forecasting High Dimensional S&P500 Portfolio Using VARX Model with Information Complexity

This study considers vector autoregressive models that allow for endogenous and exogeneous regressors VARX using multivariate OLS regression. For the model selection, we follow bozdogan’s entropic or information-theoretic measure of complexity ICOMP criterion of the estimated inverse Fisher information matrix IFIM in choosing the best VARX lag parameter and we established that ICOMP outperform the conventional information criteria. As an empirical illustration, we reduced the dimension of the S&P500 multivariate time series using Sparse Principal Component Analysis (SPCA) and chose the best subset of 37 stocks belonging to six sectors. We then performed a portfolio of stocks based on the highest SPC loading weight matrix, plus the S&P500 index. Furthermore, we applied the proposed VARX model to predict the price movements in the constructed portfolio, where the S&P500 index was treated as an exogeneous regressor of the VARX model. It has been deduced too that the buy-sell decision making in response to VARX (4,0) for a stock outperforms investing and holding the stock over the out-of-sample period

Covariance Estimation: The GLM and Regularization Perspectives

Finding an unconstrained and statistically interpretable reparameterization of a covariance matrix is still an open problem in statistics. Its solution is of central importance in covariance estimation, particularly in the recent high-dimensional data environment where enforcing the positive-definiteness constraint could be computationally expensive. We provide a survey of the progress made in modeling covariance matrices from two relatively complementary perspectives: (1) generalized linear models (GLM) or parsimony and use of covariates in low dimensions, and (2) regularization or sparsity for high-dimensional data. An emerging, unifying and powerful trend in both perspectives is that of reducing a covariance estimation problem to that of estimating a sequence of regression problems. We point out several instances of the regression-based formulation. A notable case is in sparse estimation of a precision matrix or a Gaussian graphical model leading to the fast graphical LASSO algorithm. Some advantages and limitations of the regression-based Cholesky decomposition relative to the classical spectral (eigenvalue) and variance-correlation decompositions are highlighted. The former provides an unconstrained and statistically interpretable reparameterization, and guarantees the positive-definiteness of the estimated covariance matrix. It reduces the unintuitive task of covariance estimation to that of modeling a sequence of regressions at the cost of imposing an a priori order among the variables. Elementwise regularization of the sample covariance matrix such as banding, tapering and thresholding has desirable asymptotic properties and the sparse estimated covariance matrix is positive definite with probability tending to one for large samples and dimensions.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-STS358 the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Synergizing Roughness Penalization and Basis Selection in Bayesian Spline Regression

Bayesian P-splines and basis determination through Bayesian model selection are both commonly employed strategies for nonparametric regression using spline basis expansions within the Bayesian framework. Despite their widespread use, each method has particular limitations that may introduce potential estimation bias depending on the nature of the target function. To overcome the limitations associated with each method while capitalizing on their respective strengths, we propose a new prior distribution that integrates the essentials of both approaches. The proposed prior distribution assesses the complexity of the spline model based on a penalty term formed by a convex combination of the penalties from both methods. The proposed method exhibits adaptability to the unknown level of smoothness, while achieving the minimax-optimal posterior contraction rate up to a logarithmic factor. We provide an efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm for implementing the proposed approach. Our extensive simulation study reveals that the proposed method outperforms other competitors in terms of performance metrics or model complexity

Mixed Methods for Mixed Models

This work bridges the frequentist and Bayesian approaches to mixed models by borrowing the best features from both camps: point estimation procedures are combined with priors to obtain accurate, fast inference while posterior simulation techniques are developed that approximate the likelihood with great precision for the purposes of assessing uncertainty. These allow flexible inferences without the need to rely on expensive Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation techniques. Default priors are developed and evaluated in a variety of simulation and real-world settings with the end result that we propose a new set of standard approaches that yield superior performance at little computational cost