Variable selection is vital to statistical data analyses. Many of procedures in use are ad hoc stepwise selection procedures, which are computationally expensive and ignore stochastic errors in the variable selection process of previous steps. An automatic and simultaneous variable selection procedure can be obtained by using a penalized likelihood method. In traditional linear models, the best...

Variable selection in linear models is essential for improved inference and interpretation, an activity which has become even more critical for high dimensional data. In this article, we provide a selective review of some classical methods including Akaike information criterion, Bayesian information criterion, Mallow’s Cp and risk inflation criterion, as well as regularization methods including...

We study asset allocation when the conditional moments of returns are partly predictable. Rather than first model the return distribution and subsequently characterize the portfolio choice, we determine directly the dependence of the optimal portfolio weights on the predictive variables. We combine the predictors into a single index that best captures time variations in investment opportunities...

In this paper, we present 3 different neural network-based methods to perform variable selection. OCD Optimal Cell Damage is a pruning method, which evaluates the usefulness of a variable and prunes the least useful ones (it is related to the Optimal Brain Damage method of J_.e Cun et al.). Regularization theory proposes to constrain estimators by adding a term to the cost function used to trai...

This paper proposes, focusing on random forests, the increasingly used statistical method for classification and regression problems introduced by Leo Breiman in 2001, to investigate two classical issues of variable selection. The first one is to find important variables for interpretation and the second one is more restrictive and try to design a good prediction model. The main contribution is...

in this paper, a maximum likelihood estimation and a minimum entropy estimation for the expected value and variance of normal fuzzy variable are discussed within the framework of credibility theory. as an application, a credibilistic portfolio selection model is proposed, which is an improvement over the traditional models as it only needs the predicted values on the security returns instead of...