Functional time series approach for forecasting very short-term electricity demand

This empirical paper presents a number of functional modelling and forecasting methods for predicting very short-term (such as minute-by-minute) electricity demand. The proposed functional methods slice a seasonal univariate time series (TS) into a TS of curves; reduce the dimensionality of curves by applying functional principal component analysis before using a univariate TS forecasting method and regression techniques. As data points in the daily electricity demand are sequentially observed, a forecast updating method can greatly improve the accuracy of point forecasts. Moreover, we present a non-parametric bootstrap approach to construct and update prediction intervals, and compare the point and interval forecast accuracy with some naive benchmark methods. The proposed methods are illustrated by the half-hourly electricity demand from Monday to Sunday in South Australia.     

Ordering and selecting components in multivariate or functional data linear prediction

Summary.  The problem of component choice in regression-based prediction has a long history. The main cases where important choices must be made are functional data analysis, and problems in which the explanatory variables are relatively high dimensional vectors. Indeed, principal component analysis has become the basis for methods for functional linear regression. In this context the number of components can also be interpreted as a smoothing parameter, and so the viewpoint is a little different from that for standard linear regression. However, arguments for and against conventional component choice methods are relevant to both settings and have received significant recent attention. We give a theoretical argument, which is applicable in a wide variety of settings, justifying the conventional approach. Although our result is of minimax type, it is not asymptotic in nature; it holds for each sample size. Motivated by the insight that is gained from this analysis, we give theoretical and numerical justification for cross-validation choice of the number of components that is used for prediction. In particular we show that cross-validation leads to asymptotic minimization of mean summed squared error, in settings which include functional data analysis.     

Predicting hospital census using time series regression methods

We first describe the time series modeling problem in a general way. Then some specific assumptions and observations which are pertinent to the application of these models are made. We next propose a specific approach to the modeling problem, one which yields efficient, easily calculated estimators of all parameters (under the stated assumptions). Finally, the technique is applied to the problem of modeling the census of a particular hospital.     

Analysing nonlinear time series with central subspace

Traditionally, time series analysis involves building an appropriate model and using either parametric or nonparametric methods to make inference about the model parameters. Motivated by recent developments for dimension reduction in time series, an empirical application of sufficient dimension reduction (SDR) to nonlinear time series modelling is shown in this article. Here, we use time series central subspace as a tool for SDR and estimate it using mutual information index. Especially, in order to reduce the computational complexity in time series, we propose an efficient estimation method of minimal dimension and lag using a modified Schwarz–Bayesian criterion, when either of the dimensions and the lags is unknown. Through simulations and real data analysis, the approach presented in this article performs well in autoregression and volatility estimation.     

A new reproducing kernel-based nonlinear dimension reduction method for survival data

Based on the theories of sliced inverse regression (SIR) and reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), a new approach RDSIR (RKHS-based Double SIR) to nonlinear dimension reduction for survival data is proposed. An isometric isomorphism is constructed based on the RKHS property, then the nonlinear function in the RKHS can be represented by the inner product of two elements that reside in the isomorphic feature space. Due to the censorship of survival data, double slicing is used to estimate the weight function to adjust for the censoring bias. The nonlinear sufficient dimension reduction (SDR) subspace is estimated by a generalized eigen-decomposition problem. The asymptotic property of the estimator is established based on the perturbation theory. Finally, the performance of RDSIR is illustrated on simulated and real data. The numerical results show that RDSIR is comparable with the linear SDR method. Most importantly, RDSIR can also effectively extract nonlinearity from survival data.     

基于Copula函数的金融时间序列模型述评

结合当前Copula函数及其应用的热点问题,着重评述了基于Copula函数的金融时间序列模型的应用。鉴于利用Copula可以将边际分布和变量间的相依结构分开来研究这一优良性质,在设定和估计模型时便显得极为方便和灵活。从模型的构造、Copula函数的选择、模型的估计以及拟合优度检验等几方面展开阐述和评价,介绍了Copula模型在金融领域中的几类应用,并对Copula理论和应用的新视角进行了展望。     

A study on imbalance support vector machine algorithms for sufficient dimension reduction

Li et al. (2011 Li, B., Artemiou, A., Li, L. (2011). Principal support vector machine for linear and nonlinear sufficient dimension reduction. Ann. Stat. 39:3182–3210.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) presented the novel idea of using support vector machines (SVMs) to perform sufficient dimension reduction. In this work, we investigate the potential improvement in recovering the dimension reduction subspace when one changes the SVM algorithm to treat imbalance based on several proposals in the machine learning literature. We find out that in most situations, treating the imbalanced nature of the slices will help improve the estimation. Our results are verified through simulation and real data applications.     

Dimension reduction transfer function model

The dimension reduction in regression is an efficient method of overcoming the curse of dimensionality in non-parametric regression. Motivated by recent developments for dimension reduction in time series, an empirical extension of central mean subspace in time series to a single-input transfer function model is performed in this paper. Here, we use central mean subspace as a tool of dimension reduction for bivariate time series in the case when the dimension and lag are known and estimate the central mean subspace through the Nadaraya–Watson kernel smoother. Furthermore, we develop a data-dependent approach based on a modified Schwarz Bayesian criterion to estimate the unknown dimension and lag. Finally, we show that the approach in bivariate time series works well using an expository demonstration, two simulations, and a real data analysis such as El Niño and fish Population.     

A Shrinkage Estimation of Central Subspace in Sufficient Dimension Reduction

Sliced regression is an effective dimension reduction method by replacing the original high-dimensional predictors with its appropriate low-dimensional projection. It is free from any probabilistic assumption and can exhaustively estimate the central subspace. In this article, we propose to incorporate shrinkage estimation into sliced regression so that variable selection can be achieved simultaneously with dimension reduction. The new method can improve the estimation accuracy and achieve better interpretability for the reduced variables. The efficacy of proposed method is shown through both simulation and real data analysis.     

The independent factor analysis approach to latent variable modelling

Independent factor analysis (IFA) has recently been proposed in the signal processing literature as a way to model a set of observed variables through linear combinations of latent independent variables and a noise term. A peculiarity of the method is that it defines a probability density function for the latent variables by mixtures of Gaussians. The aim of this paper is to cast the method into a more rigorous statistical framework and to propose some developments. In the first part, we present the IFA model in its population version, address identifiability issues and draw some parallels between the IFA model and the ordinary factor analysis (FA) one. Then we show that the IFA model may be reinterpreted as an independent component analysis-based rotation of an ordinary FA solution. We also give evidence that the IFA model represents a special case of mixture of factor analysers. In the second part, we address inferential issues, also deriving the standard errors for the model parameter estimates and providing model selection criteria. Finally, we present some empirical results on real data sets.     

A Note on Multiple Regression for Single Index Model

Abstract

A simple method based on sliced inverse regression (SIR) is proposed to explore an effective dimension reduction (EDR) vector for the single index model. We avoid the principle component analysis step of the original SIR by using two sample mean vectors in two slices of the response variable and their difference vector. The theories become simpler, the method is equivalent to the multiple linear regression with dichotomized response, and the estimator can be expressed by a closed form, although the objective function might be an unknown nonlinear. It can be applied for the case when the number of covariates is large, and it requires no matrix operation or iterative calculation.     

分行业的企业财务危机预警模型比较研究

世界各国学者分别用不同的统计模型对信用风险进行全行业的实证研究。中国在此方面的研究尚处起步阶段。综合运用多元判别模型、Logistic模型、主成分模型,分不同行业对企业财务危机进行预警研究。比较分析了不同行业预警模型的判别准确率,不同预警技术的判别准确率,多年度预警的可行性,预警模型的稳定性,大类、中类行业预警的通用性等问题。商业银行可以使用这些模型进行信用风险度量和信贷风险预警。     

Combination of multiple functional markers to improve diagnostic accuracy

Combination of multiple biomarkers to improve diagnostic accuracy is meaningful for practitioners and clinicians, and are attractive to lots of researchers. Nowadays, with development of modern techniques, functional markers such as curves or images, play an important role in diagnosis. There exists rich literature developing combination methods for continuous scalar markers. Unfortunately, only sporadic works have studied how functional markers affect diagnosis in the literature. Moreover, no publication can be found to do combination of multiple functional markers to improve the diagnostic accuracy. It is impossible to apply scalar combination methods to the multiple functional markers directly because of infinite dimensionality of functional markers. In this article, we propose a one-dimension scalar feature motivated by square loss distance, as an alternative of the original functional curve in the sense that, it can retain information to the most extent. The square loss distance is defined as the function of projection scores generated from functional principal component decomposition. Then existing variety of scalar combination methods can be applied to scalar features of functional markers after dimension reduction to improve the diagnostic accuracy. Area under the receiver operating characteristic curve and Youden index are used to assess performances of various methods in numerical studies. We also analyzed the high- or low- hospital admissions due to respiratory diseases between 2010 and 2017 in Hong Kong by combining weather conditions and media information, which are regarded as functional markers. Finally, we provide an R function for convenient application.     

国内删失数据统计研究状况综述

研究了国内在线性回归模型、非线性回归模型、半参数回归、非参数回归、单指标回归、生存分析、时间序列分析、密度估计等领域删失数据统计研究状况。     

A SIMPLE VARIABLE SELECTION TECHNIQUE FOR NONLINEAR MODELS

Applying nonparametric variable selection criteria in nonlinear regression models generally requires a substantial computational effort if the data set is large. In this paper we present a selection technique that is computationally much less demanding and performs well in comparison with methods currently available. It is based on a polynomial approximation of the nonlinear model. Performing the selection only requires repeated least squares estimation of models that are linear in parameters. The main limitation of the method is that the number of variables among which to select cannot be very large if the sample is small and the order of an adequate polynomial at the same time is high. Large samples can be handled without problems.     

A Note on Window Length Selection in Singular Spectrum Analysis

In singular spectrum analysis (SSA) window length is a critical tuning parameter that must be assigned by the practitioner. This paper provides a theoretical analysis of signal–noise separation and time series reconstruction in SSA that can serve as a guide to optimal window choice. We establish numerical bounds on the mean squared reconstruction error and present their almost sure limits under very general regularity conditions on the underlying data generating mechanism. We also provide asymptotic bounds for the mean squared separation error. Evidence obtained using simulation experiments and real data sets indicates that the theoretical properties are reflected in observed behaviour, even in relatively small samples, and the results indicate how, in practice, an optimal assignment for the window length can be made.     

A recursive approach to parameter estimation in regression and time series models

In this paper we discuss the recursive (or on line) estimation in (i) regression and (ii) autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) time series models. The adopted approach uses Kalman filtering techniques to calculate estimates recursively. This approach is used for the estimation of constant as well as time varying parameters. In the first section of the paper we consider the linear regression model. We discuss recursive estimation both for constant and time varying parameters. For constant parameters, Kalman filtering specializes to recursive least squares. In general, we allow the parameters to vary according to an autoregressive integrated moving average process and update the parameter estimates recursively. Since the stochastic model for the parameter changes will "be rarely known, simplifying assumptions have to be made. In particular we assume a random walk model for the time varying parameters and show how to determine whether the parameters are changing over time. This is illustrated with an example.     

An automatic robust Bayesian approach to principal component regression

Principal component regression uses principal components (PCs) as regressors. It is particularly useful in prediction settings with high-dimensional covariates. The existing literature treating of Bayesian approaches is relatively sparse. We introduce a Bayesian approach that is robust to outliers in both the dependent variable and the covariates. Outliers can be thought of as observations that are not in line with the general trend. The proposed approach automatically penalises these observations so that their impact on the posterior gradually vanishes as they move further and further away from the general trend, corresponding to a concept in Bayesian statistics called whole robustness. The predictions produced are thus consistent with the bulk of the data. The approach also exploits the geometry of PCs to efficiently identify those that are significant. Individual predictions obtained from the resulting models are consolidated according to model-averaging mechanisms to account for model uncertainty. The approach is evaluated on real data and compared to its nonrobust Bayesian counterpart, the traditional frequentist approach and a commonly employed robust frequentist method. Detailed guidelines to automate the entire statistical procedure are provided. All required code is made available, see ArXiv:1711.06341.