BAYESIAN ESTIMATION OF THE GAUSSIAN MIXTURE GARCH MODEL

Abstract

In this paper, we perform Bayesian inference and prediction for a GARCH model where the innovations are assumed to follow a mixture of two Gaussian distributions. This GARCH model can capture the patterns usually exhibited by many financial time series such as volatility clustering, large kurtosis and extreme observations. A Griddy-Gibbs sampler implementation is proposed for parameter estimation and volatility prediction. The method is illustrated using the Swiss Market Index.