A new approach for the quantification of qualitative measures of economic expectations

In this study a new approach to quantify qualitative survey data about the direction of change is presented. We propose a data-driven procedure based on evolutionary computation that avoids making any assumption about agents' expectations. The research focuses on experts' expectations about the state of the economy from the World Economic Survey in twenty eight countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The proposed method is used to transform qualitative responses into estimates of economic growth. In a first experiment, we combine agents' expectations about the future to construct a leading indicator of economic activity. In a second experiment, agents' judgements about the present are combined to generate a coincident indicator. Then, we use index tracking to derive the optimal combination of weights for both indicators that best replicates the evolution of economic activity in each country. Finally, we compute several accuracy measures to assess the performance of these estimates in tracking economic growth. The different results across countries have led us to use multidimensional scaling analysis in order to group all economies in four clusters according to their performance

A new approach for the quantification of qualitative measures of economic expectations

In this study a new approach to quantify qualitative survey data about the direction of change is presented. We propose a data-driven procedure based on evolutionary computation that avoids making any assumption about agents’ expectations. The research focuses on experts’ expectations about the state of the economy from the World Economic Survey in twenty eight countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The proposed method is used to transform qualitative responses into estimates of economic growth. In a first experiment, we combine agents’ expectations about the future to construct a leading indicator of economic activity. In a second experiment, agents’ judgements about the present are combined to generate a coincident indicator. Then, we use index tracking to derive the optimal combination of weights for both indicators that best replicates the evolution of economic activity in each country. Finally, we compute several accuracy measures to assess the performance of these estimates in tracking economic growth. The different results across countries have led us to use multidimensional scaling analysis in order to group all economies in four clusters according to their performance. We obtain the best results for Belgium, Norway, Austria, Lithuania, Japan and the United Kingdom.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Reconsidering Cohesion Policy : the Contested debate on Territorial Cohesion

The incorporation of territorial cohesion as a regional policy objective has focused attention on the potential role of territorial cooperation in pursuing this goal. However, the broad agreement on the positive effects of territorial cooperation is not always matched by the same enthusiasm when funds are being allocated. The concrete impact of territorial cooperation is often difficult to identify. At the same time, in terms of the qualitative impacts of territorial cooperation, the added value of INTERREG for territorial cohesion is difficult to dispute

Evolutionary algorithms for financial trading

Genetic programming (GP) is increasingly popular as a research tool for applications in finance and economics. One thread in this area is the use of GP to discover effective technical trading rules. In a seminal article, Allen & Karjalainen (1999) used GP to find rules that were profitable, but were nevertheless outperformed by the simple “buy and hold” trading strategy. Many succeeding attempts have reported similar findings. This represents a clear example of a significant open issue in the field of GP, namely, generalization in GP [78]. The issue of generalisation is that GP solutions may not be general enough, resulting in poor performance on unseen data. There are a small handful of cases in which such work has managed to find rules that outperform buyand- hold, but these have tended to be difficult to replicate. Among previous studies, work by Becker & Seshadri (2003) was the most promising one, which showed outperformance of buy-and-hold. In turn, Becker & Seshadri’s work had made several modifications to Allen & Karjalainen’s work, including the adoption of monthly rather than daily trading. This thesis provides a replicable account of Becker & Seshadri’s study, and also shows how further modifications enabled fairly reliable outperformance of buy-and-hold, including the use of a train/test/validate methodology [41] to evolve trading rules with good properties of generalization, and the use of a dynamic form of GP [109] to improve the performance of the algorithm in dynamic environments like financial markets. In addition, we investigate and compare each of daily, weekly and monthly trading; we find that outperformance of buy-and-hold can be achieved even for daily trading, but as we move from monthly to daily trading the performance of evolved rules becomes increasingly dependent on prevailing market conditions. This has clarified that robust outperformance of B&H depends on, mainly, the adoption of a relatively infrequent trading strategy (e.g. monthly), as well as a range of factors that amount to sound engineering of the GP grammar and the validation strategy. Moreover, v we also add a comprehensive study of multiobjective approaches to this investigation with assumption from that, and find that multiobjective strategies provide even more robustness in outperforming B&H, even in the context of more frequent (e.g. weekly) trading decisions. Last, inspired by a number of beneficial aspects of grammatical evolution (GE) and reports on the successful performance of various kinds of its applications, we introduce new approach for (GE) with a new suite of operators resulting in an improvement on GE search compared with standard GE. An empirical test of this new GE approach on various kind of test problems, including financial trading, is provided in this thesis as well

Visualization of integrated indicators of information risk in decision support systems

Decision-making is one of the essential functions of any manager. The means of visualization play a crucial role in supporting the manager in the decision-making process. This paper discusses the visualisation of information risks based on integral indicators. It provides a description of a mathematical model of the method of dynamic meta-anamorphosis and an example of its practical implementation. The advantages of using a hybrid approach to the development of dynamic meta-anamorphosis are discussed

Regional identities and competitiveness in a globalised environment: New challenges for Greek regions.

Over the last decades, at a European level, efforts have been made so that regions become capable of sustainable economic growth, with great social cohesion and better distribution of wealth, while at the same time under open market conditions, they are being exposed to external competitiveness. In order to survive and gain advantage from globalised economies, regions have to (re)form and promote a competitive profile that differentiates them from other regions and promises potentials of further development. At that point, a competitive ‘identity’ could be a key factor in dealing with persistence and change, in today’s globalised environment. The formation of regional identities seems to be a matter of great concern amongst decision / policy makers. Space in general, has a symbolic and ideological dimension, as well as a material basis that reflect the stage of development in societies. Regional identities which have a strong collective dimension, are related to factors that define and constitute societies (history, collective memory, governance, economy, culture, etc), reflect a certain inner or/and outer image and seem to be a mean to understand and measure regional development. At a social level, identities satisfy the need of belongingness and of sharing common goals, beliefs and values. Thus, they play a privileged role in strengthening social and economic cohesion by fortifying the collective consciousness and provoking the driving forces of development, especially when regions face challenges. In Greece, the recent administrative reorganizational program established by a new law in 2010, incorporates new multidimensional criteria for regional planning and development and offers potential for formation of competitive regional identities. By merging into greater ones, Greek regions could gain the required resources to face the challenges created by the economic crisis and by the high competitive and globalised environment. The new law underlines the need to restructure the economy and the regional governance system and reinforces public participation in decision making and planning process. These changes could raise the interest in forming attractive identities which, into the future and along with new regional planning strategies, could provide opportunities for economic growth and prosperity to Greek regions.