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Some Robust Approaches to Reducing the Complexity of Economic Data
Kalina, Jan
The recent advent of complex (and potentially big) data in economics requires modern and effective tools for their analysis including tools for reducing the dimensionality (complexity) of the given data. This paper starts with recalling the importance of Big Data in economics and with characterizing the main categories of dimension reduction techniques. While there have already been numerous techniques for dimensionality reduction available, this work is interested in methods that are robust to the presence of outlying measurements (outliers) in the economic data. Particularly, methods based on implicit weighting assigned to individual observations are developed in this paper. As the main contribution, this paper proposes three novel robust methods of dimension reduction. One method is a dimension reduction within a robust regularized linear regression, namely a sparse version of the least weighted squares estimator. The other two methods are robust versions of feature extraction methods popular in econometrics: robust principal component analysis and robust factor analysis.
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Some Robust Approaches to Reducing the Complexity of Economic Data
Kalina, Jan
The recent advent of complex (and potentially big) data in economics requires modern and effective tools for their analysis including tools for reducing the dimensionality (complexity) of the given data. This paper starts with recalling the importance of Big Data in economics and with characterizing the main categories of dimension reduction techniques. While there have already been numerous techniques for dimensionality reduction available, this work is interested in methods that are robust to the presence of outlying measurements (outliers) in the economic data. Particularly, methods based on implicit weighting assigned to individual observations are developed in this paper. As the main contribution, this paper proposes three novel robust methods of dimension reduction. One method is a dimension reduction within a robust regularized linear regression, namely a sparse version of the least weighted squares estimator. The other two methods are robust versions of feature extraction methods popular in econometrics: robust principal component analysis and robust factor analysis.
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Essays in Empirical Financial Economics
Žigraiová, Diana ; Jakubík, Petr (advisor) ; Witzany, Jiří (referee) ; Teplý, Petr (referee) ; Gächter, Martin (referee)
This dissertation is composed of four essays that empirically investigate three topics in financial economics; financial stress and its leading indicators, the relationship between bank competition and financial stability, and the link between management board composition and bank risk. In the first essay we examine which variables have predictive power for financial stress in 25 OECD countries, using a recently constructed financial stress index. We find that panel models can hardly explain FSI dynamics. Although better results are achieved in country models, our findings suggest that financial stress is hard to predict out-of- sample despite the reasonably good in-sample performance of the models. The second essay develops an early warning framework for assessing systemic risks and predicting systemic events over two horizons of different length on a panel of 14 countries. We build a financial stress index to identify the starting dates of systemic financial crises and select crisis-leading indicators in a two-step approach; we find relevant prediction horizons for each indicator and employ Bayesian model averaging to identify the most useful predictors. We find superior performance of the long-horizon model for the Czech Republic. The theoretical literature gives conflicting predictions on how bank...
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A Robustified Metalearning Procedure for Regression Estimators
Kalina, Jan ; Neoral, A.
Metalearning represents a useful methodology for selecting and recommending a suitable algorithm or method for a new dataset exploiting a database of training datasets. While metalearning is potentially beneficial for the analysis of economic data, we must be aware of its instability and sensitivity to outlying measurements (outliers) as well as measurement errors. The aim of this paper is to robustify the metalearning process. First, we prepare some useful theoretical tools exploiting the idea of implicit weighting, inspired by the least weighted squares estimator. These include a robust coefficient of determination, a robust version of mean square error, and a simple rule for outlier detection in linear regression. We perform a metalearning study for recommending the best linear regression estimator for a new dataset (not included in the training database). The prediction of the optimal estimator is learned over a set of 20 real datasets with economic motivation, while the least squares are compared with several (highly) robust estimators. We investigate the effect of variable selection on the metalearning results. If the training as well as validation data are considered after a proper robust variable selection, the metalearning performance is improved remarkably, especially if a robust prediction error is used.
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A Robustified Metalearning Procedure for Regression Estimators
Kalina, Jan ; Neoral, A.
Metalearning represents a useful methodology for selecting and recommending a suitable algorithm or method for a new dataset exploiting a database of training datasets. While metalearning is potentially beneficial for the analysis of economic data, we must be aware of its instability and sensitivity to outlying measurements (outliers) as well as measurement errors. The aim of this paper is to robustify the metalearning process. First, we prepare some useful theoretical tools exploiting the idea of implicit weighting, inspired by the least weighted squares estimator. These include a robust coefficient of determination, a robust version of mean square error, and a simple rule for outlier detection in linear regression. We perform a metalearning study for recommending the best linear regression estimator for a new dataset (not included in the training database). The prediction of the optimal estimator is learned over a set of 20 real datasets with economic motivation, while the least squares are compared with several (highly) robust estimators. We investigate the effect of variable selection on the metalearning results. If the training as well as validation data are considered after a proper robust variable selection, the metalearning performance is improved remarkably, especially if a robust prediction error is used.
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Essays in Empirical Financial Economics
Žigraiová, Diana ; Jakubík, Petr (advisor) ; Witzany, Jiří (referee) ; Teplý, Petr (referee) ; Gächter, Martin (referee)
This dissertation is composed of four essays that empirically investigate three topics in financial economics; financial stress and its leading indicators, the relationship between bank competition and financial stability, and the link between management board composition and bank risk. In the first essay we examine which variables have predictive power for financial stress in 25 OECD countries, using a recently constructed financial stress index. We find that panel models can hardly explain FSI dynamics. Although better results are achieved in country models, our findings suggest that financial stress is hard to predict out-of- sample despite the reasonably good in-sample performance of the models. The second essay develops an early warning framework for assessing systemic risks and predicting systemic events over two horizons of different length on a panel of 14 countries. We build a financial stress index to identify the starting dates of systemic financial crises and select crisis-leading indicators in a two-step approach; we find relevant prediction horizons for each indicator and employ Bayesian model averaging to identify the most useful predictors. We find superior performance of the long-horizon model for the Czech Republic. The theoretical literature gives conflicting predictions on how bank...
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Essays in Empirical Financial Economics
Žigraiová, Diana ; Jakubík, Petr (advisor) ; Witzany, Jiří (referee) ; Teplý, Petr (referee) ; Gächter, Martin (referee)
This dissertation is composed of four essays that empirically investigate three topics in financial economics; financial stress and its leading indicators, the relationship between bank competition and financial stability, and the link between management board composition and bank risk. In the first essay we examine which variables have predictive power for financial stress in 25 OECD countries, using a recently constructed financial stress index. We find that panel models can hardly explain FSI dynamics. Although better results are achieved in country models, our findings suggest that financial stress is hard to predict out-of- sample despite the reasonably good in-sample performance of the models. The second essay develops an early warning framework for assessing systemic risks and predicting systemic events over two horizons of different length on a panel of 14 countries. We build a financial stress index to identify the starting dates of systemic financial crises and select crisis-leading indicators in a two-step approach; we find relevant prediction horizons for each indicator and employ Bayesian model averaging to identify the most useful predictors. We find superior performance of the long-horizon model for the Czech Republic. The theoretical literature gives conflicting predictions on how bank...
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Bayesian variable selection
Jančařík, Joel ; Komárek, Arnošt (advisor) ; Hlávka, Zdeněk (referee)
The selection of variables problem is ussual problem of statistical analysis. Solving this problem via Bayesian statistic become popular in 1990s. We re- view classical methods for bayesian variable selection methods and set a common framework for them. Indicator model selection methods and adaptive shrinkage methods for normal linear model are covered. Main benefit of this work is incorporating Bayesian theory and Markov Chain Monte Carlo theory (MCMC). All derivations needed for MCMC algorithms is provided. Afterward the methods are apllied on simulated and real data. 1
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Introduction to Feature Selection Toolbox 3 – The C++ Library for Subset Search, Data Modeling and Classification
Somol, Petr ; Vácha, Pavel ; Mikeš, Stanislav ; Hora, Jan ; Pudil, Pavel ; Žid, Pavel
We introduce a new standalone widely applicable software library for feature selection (also known as attribute or variable selection), capable of reducing problem dimensionality to maximize the accuracy of data models, performance of automatic decision rules as well as to reduce data acquisition cost. The library can be exploited by users in research as well as in industry. Less experienced users can experiment with different provided methods and their application to real-life problems, experts can implement their own criteria or search schemes taking advantage of the toolbox framework. In this paper we first provide a concise survey of a variety of existing feature selection approaches. Then we focus on a selected group of methods of good general performance as well as on tools surpassing the limits of existing libraries. We build a feature selection framework around them and design an object-based generic software library. We describe the key design points and properties of the library.
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