This work focuses on functional data presenting spatial dependence. The spatial autocorrelation of stock exchange returns for 71 stock exchanges from 69 countries was investigated using the functional Moran’s I statistic, classical principal component analysis (PCA) and functional areal spatial principal component analysis (FASPCA). This work focuses on the period where the 2015–2016 global market sell-off occurred and proved the existence of spatial autocorrelation among the stock exchanges studied. The stock exchange return data were converted into functional data before performing the classical PCA and FASPCA. Results from the Monte Carlo test of the functional Moran’s I statistics show that the 2015–2016 global market sell-off had a great impact on the spatial autocorrelation of stock exchanges. Principal components from FASPCA show positive spatial autocorrelation in the stock exchanges. Regional clusters were formed before, after and during the 2015–2016 global market sell-off period. This work explored the existence of positive spatial autocorrelation in global stock exchanges and showed that FASPCA is a useful tool in exploring spatial dependency in complex spatial data.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, cryptocurrency prices showed abnormal volatility that attracted the participation of many investors. Studying the behaviour of volatility for the prices of cryptocurrency is an interesting problem to be investigated. This research implements the state space model framework for volatility incorporating the Kalman filter. This method directly forecasts the conditional volatility of five cryptocurrency prices (Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Ripple (XRP), Litecoin (LTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH)) for 10,000 consecutive hours, i.e., approximately 417 days during the COVID-19 pandemic from 26 February 2020, 00:00 h until 18 April 2021, 00:00 h. The performance of this model is compared to the GARCH (1,1) model and the neural network autoregressive (NNAR) based on root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE) and the volatility plot. The autocorrelation function plot, histogram and the residuals plot are used to examine the model adequacy. Among the three models, the state space model gives the best fit. The state space model gives the narrowest confidence interval of volatility and value-at-risk forecasts among the three models.

The Lee–Carter model is a well-known model in modeling mortality. We aim to compare three probability models (Poisson, negative binomial and binomial) based on the Generalized Linear Model (GLM) framework of the Lee–Carter model. These models are applied to mortality data for 10 selected countries (Japan, United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Sweden, Spain, Belgium, Canada, Netherlands and Bulgaria) and the fit of these models is assessed using the deviance statistics and standardized residuals against fitted value plot. Among these three models, the negative binomial Lee–Carter model gave the best fit based on the deviance statistics and estimates of the log of deaths.

This study implements various, maximum overlap, discrete wavelet transform filters to model and forecast the time-dependent mortality index of the Lee-Carter model. The choice of appropriate wavelet filters is essential in effectively capturing the dynamics in a period. This cannot be accomplished by using the ARIMA model alone. In this paper, the ARIMA model is enhanced with the integration of various maximal overlap discrete wavelet transform filters such as the least asymmetric, best-localized, and Coiflet filters. These models are then applied to the mortality data of Australia, England, France, Japan, and USA. The accuracy of the projecting log of death rates of the MODWT-ARIMA model with the aforementioned wavelet filters are assessed using mean absolute error, mean absolute percentage error, and mean absolute scaled error. The MODWT-ARIMA (5,1,0) model with the BL14 filter gives the best fit to the log of death rates data for males, females, and total population, for all five countries studied. Implementing the MODWT leads towards improvement in the performance of the standard framework of the LC model in forecasting mortality rates.

The heteroscedastic and volatile characteristics of stock price data have attracted the interest of researchers from various disciplines, particularly in the realm of price forecasting. The stock market’s non-stationary and volatile nature, driven by complex interrelationships among financial assets, economic developments, and market participants, poses significant challenges for accurate forecasting. This research aims to develop a robust forecasting model to improve the accuracy and reliability of stock price predictions using machine learning. A two-stage forecasting model is introduced. First, a random forest subset-based (RFS) feature selection with repeated k -fold cross-validation selects the best subset of features from eight predictors: highest price, lowest price, closing price, volume, change, price change ratio, and amplitude. These features are then used as input in a bidirectional gated recurrent unit with an attention mechanism (BiGRU-AM) model to forecast daily opening prices of ten stock indices. The proposed model exhibits superior forecasting performance across ten stock indices when compared to twelve benchmarks, evaluated using root mean squared error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and the coefficient of determination, R2 . The improved prediction accuracy enables financial professionals to make more reliable investment decisions, reducing risks and increasing profits.

There has been a growing interest in discrete circular models such as wrapped zero inflated Poisson and wrapped Poisson distributions and the trigonometric moments (see Brobbey et al., 2016 and Girija et al., 2014). Also, characteristic functions of stable processes have been used to study the estimation of the model parameters using estimating function approach (see Thavaneswaran et al., 2013). One difficulty in estimating the circular mean and the resultant mean length parameter of wrapped Poisson (WP) or wrapped zero inflated Poisson (WZIP) is that neither the likelihood of WP/WZIP random variable nor the score function is available in closed form, which leads one to use either trigonometric method of moment estimation (TMME) or an estimating function approach. In this paper, we study the estimation of WZIP distribution and WP distribution using estimating functions and obtain the closed form expression of the information matrix. We also derive the asymptotic distribution of the tangent of the mean direction for both the WZIP and WP distributions.