A Comparison of Hierarchical Bayesian Models for Small Area Estimation of Counts

Small area estimation (SAE) tackles the problem of providing reliable estimates for small areas, i.e., subsets of the population for which sample information is not sufficient to warrant the use of a direct estimator. Hierarchical Bayesian approach to SAE problems offers several advantages over traditional SAE models including the ability of appropriately accounting for the type of surveyed variable. In this paper, a number of model specifications for estimating small area counts are discussed and their relative merits are illustrated. We conducted a simulation study by reproducing in a simplified form the Italian Labour Force Survey and taking the Local Labor Markets as target areas. Simulated data were generated by assuming population characteristics of interest as well as survey sampling design as known. In one set of experiments, numbers of employment/unemployment from census data were utilized, in others population characteristics were varied. Results show persistent model failures for some standard Fay-Herriot specifications and for generalized linear Poisson models with (log-)normal sampling stage, whilst either unmatched or nonnormal sampling stage models get the best performance in terms of bias, accuracy and reliability. Though, the study also found that any model noticeably improves on its performance by letting sampling variances be stochastically determined rather than assumed as known as is the general practice. Moreover, we address the issue of model determination to point out limits and possible deceptions of commonly used criteria for model selection and checking in SAE context

Effect of training set selection when predicting defaulter SMEs with unbalanced data

We focus on credit scoring methods to separate defaulter small and medium enterprises from non-defaulter ones. In this framework, a typical problem occurs because the proportion of defaulter firms is very close to zero, leading to a class imbalance problem. Moreover, a form of bias may affect the classification. In fact, classification models are usually based on balance sheet items of large corporations which are not randomly selected. We investigate how different criteria of sample selection may affect the accuracy of the classification and how this problem is strongly related to the imbalance of the classes

Training and assessing classification rules with unbalanced data

The problem of modeling binary responses by using cross-sectional data has been addressed with a number of satisfying solutions that draw on both parametric and nonparametric methods. However, there exist many real situations where one of the two responses (usually the most interesting for the analysis) is rare. It has been largely reported that this class imbalance heavily compromises the process of learning, because the model tends to focus on the prevalent class and to ignore the rare events. However, not only the estimation of the classification model is affected by a skewed distribution of the classes, but also the evaluation of its accuracy is jeopardized, because the scarcity of data leads to poor estimates of the model’s accuracy. In this work, the effects of class imbalance on model training and model assessing are discussed. Moreover, a unified and systematic framework for dealing with both the problems is proposed, based on a smoothed bootstrap re-sampling technique

Clustering of time series via non-parametric tail dependence estimation

We present a procedure for clustering time series according to their tail dependence behaviour as measured via a suitable copula-based tail coefficient, estimated in a non-parametric way. Simulation results about the proposed methodology together with an application to financial data are presented showing the usefulness of the proposed approach

Relabelling in Bayesian mixture models by pivotal units

A simple procedure based on relabelling to deal with label switching when exploring complex posterior distributions by MCMC algorithms is proposed. Although it cannot be generalized to any situation, it may be handy in many applications because of its simplicity and low computational burden. A possible area where it proves to be useful is when deriving a sample for the posterior distribution arising from finite mixture models when no simple or rational ordering between the components is available