Does a lot help a lot? Forecasting stock returns with pooling strategies in a data‐rich environment

A variety of recent studies provide a skeptical view on the predictability of stock returns. Empirical evidence shows that most prediction models suffer from a loss of information, model uncertainty, and structural instability by relying on low‐dimensional information sets. In this study, we evaluate the predictive ability of various lately refined forecasting strategies, which handle these issues by incorporating information from many potential predictor variables simultaneously. We investigate whether forecasting strategies that (i) combine information and (ii) combine individual forecasts are useful to predict US stock returns, that is, the market excess return, size, value, and the momentum premium. Our results show that methods combining information have remarkable in‐sample predictive ability. However, the out‐of‐sample performance suffers from highly volatile forecast errors. Forecast combinations face a better bias–efficiency trade‐off, yielding a consistently superior forecast performance for the market excess return and the size premium even after the 1970s.     

Forecasting the duration of short‐term deflation episodes

The paper proposes a simulation‐based approach to multistep probabilistic forecasting, applied for predicting the probability and duration of negative inflation. The essence of this approach is in counting runs simulated from a multivariate distribution representing the probabilistic forecasts, which enters the negative inflation regime. The marginal distributions of forecasts are estimated using the series of past forecast errors, and the joint distribution is obtained by a multivariate copula approach. This technique is applied for estimating the probability of negative inflation in China and its expected duration, with the marginal distributions computed by fitting weighted skew‐normal and two‐piece normal distributions to autoregressive moving average ex post forecast errors and using the multivariate Student t copula.     

Forecasting in long horizons using smoothed direct forecast

This paper constructs a forecast method that obtains long‐horizon forecasts with improved performance through modification of the direct forecast approach. Direct forecasts are more robust to model misspecification compared to iterated forecasts, which makes them preferable in long horizons. However, direct forecast estimates tend to have jagged shapes across horizons. Our forecast method aims to “smooth out” erratic estimates across horizons while maintaining the robust aspect of direct forecasts through ridge regression, which is a restricted regression on the first differences of regression coefficients. The forecasts are compared to the conventional iterated and direct forecasts in two empirical applications: real oil prices and US macroeconomic series. In both applications, our method shows improvement over direct forecasts.     

考虑产品特征属性的替代性需求预测方法

随着电商销售业务的高速发展, 对用户需求进行快速准确预测已成为重要的研究方向. 产品间的替代性对需求有一定影响作用, 且此方面的应用研究在不断深入. 为了提升需求预测精度, 基于畅销预测属性值排序, 利用邻近替代率估计方法, 并结合 Adaboost 预测模型, 构建出一种更优的考虑产品特征属性的替代性需求预测方法, 并通过实验证明该方法行之有效.     

空间用四轴陀螺组合浪涌防护及数据填补方法

针对空间用四轴陀螺组合换轴及光源切换时产生浪涌以及数据丢失的问题, 提出了一种浪涌防护及数据填补方法。首先，采用双光源方案, 设计了浪涌防护电路, 降低了上电过程中瞬时大电流对元器件的影响。然后，建立了数据填补机制, 用来弥补切换过程中丢失的数据。最后，进行了地面数据填补实验, 角速率分别设为0.174 5 rad/s和1.745 rad/s, 预测的角速率与实际的角速率分别相差不超过0.003 rad/s和0.008 rad/s, 相对残差分别为0.003 9和0.001 2, 验证了所提方法的有效性。     

“二三结合”开发模式渗流特征研究

L油田B区块开展"二三结合"实验区,"二三结合"开发模式渗流特征对区块的合理高效开发具有重要意义。为了明确其渗流特征,利用油藏数值模拟软件Eclipse建立代表意义的油藏数值模型,研究区块"二三结合"开发模式下原射孔层和补孔层的渗流特征,分析了"二三结合"开发模式下,不同开发阶段综合含水率、采出程度、井底压力、地层压力及含水饱和度的变化特征。研究表明,"二三结合"开发模式先通过水驱开发挖潜原射孔层剩余油,提高厚油层顶部剩余油的采出程度,再通过聚合物驱进一步提高开发效果,通过水驱与聚驱的综合作用,最终得到较好的开发效果。     

典型陆军部队装备维修作业能力评估系统仿真建模研究

针对陆军部队维修作业仿真评估需求,提出了一套仿真模型设计方案。分析了部队维修作业能力仿真评估原理,进而明确了评估模型需求;给出了维修任务生成、维修保障系统建模方案;结合备件调度和保障设备使用过程,设计了维修保障资源模型。为陆军部队装备维修作业能力评估提供建模基础,用于支撑部队维修作业能力仿真评估系统的设计和应用案例研究。     

Predicting exchange rates in Asia: New insights on the accuracy of survey forecasts

By linking measures of forecast accuracy as well as testing procedures with regard to forecast rationality this paper investigates aggregated survey forecasts with forecast horizons of 3, 12, and 24 months for the exchange rates of the Chinese yuan, the Hong Kong dollar, the Japanese yen, and the Singapore dollar vis-à-vis the US dollar and, hence, for four different currency regimes. The rationality of the exchange rate predictions is initially assessed utilizing tests for unbiasedness and efficiency which indicate that the investigated forecasts are irrational in the sense that the predictions are biased. As one major contribution of this paper, it is subsequently shown that these results are not consistent with an alternative, less restrictive, measure of rationality. Investigating the order of integration of the time series as well as cointegrating relationships, this empirical evidence supports the conclusion that the majority of forecasts are in fact rational. Regarding forerunning properties of the predictions, the results are rather mediocre, with shorter term forecasts for the tightly managed USD/CNY FX regime being one exception. As one additional important and novel evaluation result, it can be concluded, that the currency regime matters for the quality of exchange rate forecasts.     

Combining multivariate volatility forecasts using weighted losses

The ability to improve out-of-sample forecasting performance by combining forecasts is well established in the literature. This paper advances this literature in the area of multivariate volatility forecasts by developing two combination weighting schemes that exploit volatility persistence to emphasise certain losses within the combination estimation period. A comprehensive empirical analysis of the out-of-sample forecast performance across varying dimensions, loss functions, sub-samples and forecast horizons show that new approaches significantly outperform their counterparts in terms of statistical accuracy. Within the financial applications considered, significant benefits from combination forecasts relative to the individual candidate models are observed. Although the more sophisticated combination approaches consistently rank higher relative to the equally weighted approach, their performance is statistically indistinguishable given the relatively low power of these loss functions. Finally, within the applications, further analysis highlights how combination forecasts dramatically reduce the variability in the parameter of interest, namely the portfolio weight or beta.     

Model averaging estimation for conditional volatility models with an application to stock market volatility forecast

This paper is concerned with model averaging estimation for conditional volatility models. Given a set of candidate models with different functional forms, we propose a model averaging estimator and forecast for conditional volatility, and construct the corresponding weight-choosing criterion. Under some regulatory conditions, we show that the weight selected by the criterion asymptotically minimizes the true Kullback–Leibler divergence, which is the distributional approximation error, as well as the Itakura–Saito distance, which is the distance between the true and estimated or forecast conditional volatility. Monte Carlo experiments support our newly proposed method. As for the empirical applications of our method, we investigate a total of nine major stock market indices and make a 1-day-ahead volatility forecast for each data set. Empirical results show that the model averaging forecast achieves the highest accuracy in terms of all types of loss functions in most cases, which captures the movement of the unknown true conditional volatility.