The modeling of high-frequency data that qualify financial asset transactions has been an area of relevant interest among statisticians and econometricians -- above all, the analysis of time series of financial durations. Autoregressive conditional duration (ACD) models have been the main tool for modeling financial transaction data, where duration is usually defined as the time interval between two successive events. These models are usually specified in terms of a time-varying mean (or median) conditional duration. In this paper, a new extension of ACD models is proposed which is built on the basis of log-symmetric distributions reparametrized by their quantile. The proposed quantile log-symmetric conditional duration autoregressive model allows us to model different percentiles instead of the traditionally used conditional mean (or median) duration. We carry out an in-depth study of theoretical properties and practical issues, such as parameter estimation using maximum likelihood method and diagnostic analysis based on residuals. A detailed Monte Carlo simulation study is also carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed models and estimation method in retrieving the true parameter values as well as to evaluate a form of residuals. Finally, the proposed class of models is applied to a price duration data set and then used to derive a semi-parametric intraday value-at-risk (IVaR) model.
The proliferation of data generation has spurred advancements in functional data analysis. With the ability to analyze multiple variables simultaneously, the demand for working with multivariate functional data has increased. This study proposes a novel formulation of the epigraph and hypograph indexes, as well as their generalized expressions, specifically tailored for the multivariate functional context. These definitions take into account the interrelations between components. Furthermore, the proposed indexes are employed to cluster multivariate functional data. In the clustering process, the indexes are applied to both the data and their first and second derivatives. This generates a reduced-dimension dataset from the original multivariate functional data, enabling the application of well-established multivariate clustering techniques which have been extensively studied in the literature. This methodology has been tested through simulated and real datasets, performing comparative analyses against state-of-the-art to assess its performance.
Over the last decade, approximating functions in infinite dimensions from samples has gained increasing attention in computational science and engineering, especially in computational uncertainty quantification. This is primarily due to the relevance of functions that are solutions to parametric differential equations in various fields, e.g. chemistry, economics, engineering, and physics. While acquiring accurate and reliable approximations of such functions is inherently difficult, current benchmark methods exploit the fact that such functions often belong to certain classes of holomorphic functions to get algebraic convergence rates in infinite dimensions with respect to the number of (potentially adaptive) samples $m$. Our work focuses on providing theoretical approximation guarantees for the class of $(\boldsymbol{b},\varepsilon)$-holomorphic functions, demonstrating that these algebraic rates are the best possible for Banach-valued functions in infinite dimensions. We establish lower bounds using a reduction to a discrete problem in combination with the theory of $m$-widths, Gelfand widths and Kolmogorov widths. We study two cases, known and unknown anisotropy, in which the relative importance of the variables is known and unknown, respectively. A key conclusion of our paper is that in the latter setting, approximation from finite samples is impossible without some inherent ordering of the variables, even if the samples are chosen adaptively. Finally, in both cases, we demonstrate near-optimal, non-adaptive (random) sampling and recovery strategies which achieve close to same rates as the lower bounds.
Finding the optimal design of experiments in the Bayesian setting typically requires estimation and optimization of the expected information gain functional. This functional consists of one outer and one inner integral, separated by the logarithm function applied to the inner integral. When the mathematical model of the experiment contains uncertainty about the parameters of interest and nuisance uncertainty, (i.e., uncertainty about parameters that affect the model but are not themselves of interest to the experimenter), two inner integrals must be estimated. Thus, the already considerable computational effort required to determine good approximations of the expected information gain is increased further. The Laplace approximation has been applied successfully in the context of experimental design in various ways, and we propose two novel estimators featuring the Laplace approximation to alleviate the computational burden of both inner integrals considerably. The first estimator applies Laplace's method followed by a Laplace approximation, introducing a bias. The second estimator uses two Laplace approximations as importance sampling measures for Monte Carlo approximations of the inner integrals. Both estimators use Monte Carlo approximation for the remaining outer integral estimation. We provide three numerical examples demonstrating the applicability and effectiveness of our proposed estimators.
The optimal number of clusters is one of the main concerns when applying cluster analysis. Several cluster validity indexes have been introduced to address this problem. However, in some situations, there is more than one option that can be chosen as the final number of clusters. This aspect has been overlooked by most of the existing works in this area. In this study, we introduce a correlation-based fuzzy cluster validity index known as the Wiroonsri-Preedasawakul (WP) index. This index is defined based on the correlation between the actual distance between a pair of data points and the distance between adjusted centroids with respect to that pair. We evaluate and compare the performance of our index with several existing indexes, including Xie-Beni, Pakhira-Bandyopadhyay-Maulik, Tang, Wu-Li, generalized C, and Kwon2. We conduct this evaluation on four types of datasets: artificial datasets, real-world datasets, simulated datasets with ranks, and image datasets, using the fuzzy c-means algorithm. Overall, the WP index outperforms most, if not all, of these indexes in terms of accurately detecting the optimal number of clusters and providing accurate secondary options. Moreover, our index remains effective even when the fuzziness parameter $m$ is set to a large value. Our R package called UniversalCVI used in this work is available at //CRAN.R-project.org/package=UniversalCVI.
Vintage factor analysis is one important type of factor analysis that aims to first find a low-dimensional representation of the original data, and then to seek a rotation such that the rotated low-dimensional representation is scientifically meaningful. Perhaps the most widely used vintage factor analysis is the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) followed by the varimax rotation. Despite its popularity, little theoretical guarantee can be provided mainly because varimax rotation requires to solve a non-convex optimization over the set of orthogonal matrices. In this paper, we propose a deflation varimax procedure that solves each row of an orthogonal matrix sequentially. In addition to its net computational gain and flexibility, we are able to fully establish theoretical guarantees for the proposed procedure in a broad context. Adopting this new varimax approach as the second step after PCA, we further analyze this two step procedure under a general class of factor models. Our results show that it estimates the factor loading matrix in the optimal rate when the signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) is moderate or large. In the low SNR regime, we offer possible improvement over using PCA and the deflation procedure when the additive noise under the factor model is structured. The modified procedure is shown to be optimal in all SNR regimes. Our theory is valid for finite sample and allows the number of the latent factors to grow with the sample size as well as the ambient dimension to grow with, or even exceed, the sample size. Extensive simulation and real data analysis further corroborate our theoretical findings.
Engineers are often faced with the decision to select the most appropriate model for simulating the behavior of engineered systems, among a candidate set of models. Experimental monitoring data can generate significant value by supporting engineers toward such decisions. Such data can be leveraged within a Bayesian model updating process, enabling the uncertainty-aware calibration of any candidate model. The model selection task can subsequently be cast into a problem of decision-making under uncertainty, where one seeks to select the model that yields an optimal balance between the reward associated with model precision, in terms of recovering target Quantities of Interest (QoI), and the cost of each model, in terms of complexity and compute time. In this work, we examine the model selection task by means of Bayesian decision theory, under the prism of availability of models of various refinements, and thus varying levels of fidelity. In doing so, we offer an exemplary application of this framework on the IMAC-MVUQ Round-Robin Challenge. Numerical investigations show various outcomes of model selection depending on the target QoI.
The accuracy of solving partial differential equations (PDEs) on coarse grids is greatly affected by the choice of discretization schemes. In this work, we propose to learn time integration schemes based on neural networks which satisfy three distinct sets of mathematical constraints, i.e., unconstrained, semi-constrained with the root condition, and fully-constrained with both root and consistency conditions. We focus on the learning of 3-step linear multistep methods, which we subsequently applied to solve three model PDEs, i.e., the one-dimensional heat equation, the one-dimensional wave equation, and the one-dimensional Burgers' equation. The results show that the prediction error of the learned fully-constrained scheme is close to that of the Runge-Kutta method and Adams-Bashforth method. Compared to the traditional methods, the learned unconstrained and semi-constrained schemes significantly reduce the prediction error on coarse grids. On a grid that is 4 times coarser than the reference grid, the mean square error shows a reduction of up to an order of magnitude for some of the heat equation cases, and a substantial improvement in phase prediction for the wave equation. On a 32 times coarser grid, the mean square error for the Burgers' equation can be reduced by up to 35% to 40%.
We introduce time-ordered multibody interactions to describe complex systems manifesting temporal as well as multibody dependencies. First, we show how the dynamics of multivariate Markov chains can be decomposed in ensembles of time-ordered multibody interactions. Then, we present an algorithm to extract those interactions from data capturing the system-level dynamics of node states and a measure to characterize the complexity of interaction ensembles. Finally, we experimentally validate the robustness of our algorithm against statistical errors and its efficiency at inferring parsimonious interaction ensembles.
We numerically investigate the possibility of defining stabilization-free Virtual Element (VEM) discretizations of advection-diffusion problems in the advection-dominated regime. To this end, we consider a SUPG stabilized formulation of the scheme. Numerical tests comparing the proposed method with standard VEM show that the lack of an additional arbitrary stabilization term, typical of VEM schemes, that adds artificial diffusion to the discrete solution, allows to better approximate boundary layers, in particular in the case of a low order scheme.
A key challenge when trying to understand innovation is that it is a dynamic, ongoing process, which can be highly contingent on ephemeral factors such as culture, economics, or luck. This means that any analysis of the real-world process must necessarily be historical - and thus probably too late to be most useful - but also cannot be sure what the properties of the web of connections between innovations is or was. Here I try to address this by designing and generating a set of synthetic innovation web "dictionaries" that can be used to host sampled innovation timelines, probe the overall statistics and behaviours of these processes, and determine the degree of their reliance on the structure or generating algorithm. Thus, inspired by the work of Fink, Reeves, Palma and Farr (2017) on innovation in language, gastronomy, and technology, I study how new symbol discovery manifests itself in terms of additional "word" vocabulary being available from dictionaries generated from a finite number of symbols. Several distinct dictionary generation models are investigated using numerical simulation, with emphasis on the scaling of knowledge as dictionary generators and parameters are varied, and the role of which order the symbols are discovered in.