Spring Seminar Series - April 13, 2006
University of Minnesota
School of Statistics
College of Liberal Arts

Nonlinear Properties of Conditional Log-returns Under Scale Mixtures

Venkata Krishna Jandhyala
Department of Statistics
Washington State University

Thursday, April 13, 2006
3:30 PM, 115 Ford Hall
Minneapolis, East Bank Campus
Social at 3:00 PM, 300 Ford Hall

Abstract

Analytical expressions are derived for the nonlinear regression and its prediction error by modeling the log returns of financial assets as scale mixtures of the multivariate normal distribution. The expressions involve conditional moments of the mixing variable. These conditional moments are explicitly derived when the mixing variable belongs to the generalized inverse Gaussian (GIG) family, of which, gamma, inverse gamma, and the inverse Gaussian distributions are members. The effectiveness of the nonlinear model over the usual linear model is captured through simulations for the above three families of distributions. The proposed scale mixture models extend the arbitrage pricing theory (APT) in financial modeling to non-Gaussian cases. The methodology is applied to analyze the log returns intra-day data for DELL, COKE and S&P 500 for the years 1998-2000.