Spanning Tests for Markowitz Stochastic Dominance

We derive properties of the cdf of random variables defined as saddle-type points of real valued continuous stochastic processes. This facilitates the derivation of the first-order asymptotic properties of tests for stochastic spanning given some stochastic dominance relation. We define the concept of Markowitz stochastic dominance spanning, and develop an analytical representation of the spanning property. We construct a non-parametric test for spanning based on subsampling, and derive its asymptotic exactness and consistency. The spanning methodology determines whether introducing new securities or relaxing investment constraints improves the investment opportunity set of investors driven by Markowitz stochastic dominance. In an application to standard data sets of historical stock market returns, we reject market portfolio Markowitz efficiency as well as two-fund separation. Hence, we find evidence that equity management through base assets can outperform the market, for investors with Markowitz type preferences

Feature Selection for Functional Data

In this paper we address the problem of feature selection when the data is functional, we study several statistical procedures including classification, regression and principal components. One advantage of the blinding procedure is that it is very flexible since the features are defined by a set of functions, relevant to the problem being studied, proposed by the user. Our method is consistent under a set of quite general assumptions, and produces good results with the real data examples that we analyze.Comment: 22 pages, 4 figure

Forecasting day-ahead electricity prices in Europe: the importance of considering market integration

Motivated by the increasing integration among electricity markets, in this paper we propose two different methods to incorporate market integration in electricity price forecasting and to improve the predictive performance. First, we propose a deep neural network that considers features from connected markets to improve the predictive accuracy in a local market. To measure the importance of these features, we propose a novel feature selection algorithm that, by using Bayesian optimization and functional analysis of variance, evaluates the effect of the features on the algorithm performance. In addition, using market integration, we propose a second model that, by simultaneously predicting prices from two markets, improves the forecasting accuracy even further. As a case study, we consider the electricity market in Belgium and the improvements in forecasting accuracy when using various French electricity features. We show that the two proposed models lead to improvements that are statistically significant. Particularly, due to market integration, the predictive accuracy is improved from 15.7% to 12.5% sMAPE (symmetric mean absolute percentage error). In addition, we show that the proposed feature selection algorithm is able to perform a correct assessment, i.e. to discard the irrelevant features

Statistical methods of SNP data analysis with applications

Various statistical methods important for genetic analysis are considered and developed. Namely, we concentrate on the multifactor dimensionality reduction, logic regression, random forests and stochastic gradient boosting. These methods and their new modifications, e.g., the MDR method with "independent rule", are used to study the risk of complex diseases such as cardiovascular ones. The roles of certain combinations of single nucleotide polymorphisms and external risk factors are examined. To perform the data analysis concerning the ischemic heart disease and myocardial infarction the supercomputer SKIF "Chebyshev" of the Lomonosov Moscow State University was employed

Targeted Undersmoothing

This paper proposes a post-model selection inference procedure, called targeted undersmoothing, designed to construct uniformly valid confidence sets for a broad class of functionals of sparse high-dimensional statistical models. These include dense functionals, which may potentially depend on all elements of an unknown high-dimensional parameter. The proposed confidence sets are based on an initially selected model and two additionally selected models, an upper model and a lower model, which enlarge the initially selected model. We illustrate application of the procedure in two empirical examples. The first example considers estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects using data from the Job Training Partnership Act of 1982, and the second example looks at estimating profitability from a mailing strategy based on estimated heterogeneous treatment effects in a direct mail marketing campaign. We also provide evidence on the finite sample performance of the proposed targeted undersmoothing procedure through a series of simulation experiments