This study evaluates the efficiency of peripheral European domestic banks and examines the effects of bankrisk determinants on their performance over 2007-2014. Data Envelopment Analysis is utilized on a Malmquist Productivity Index in order to calculate the bank efficiency scores. Next, a Double Bootstrapped Truncated Regression is applied to obtain bias-corrected scores and examine whether changes in the financial conditions affect differently banks' efficiency levels. The analysis accounts for the sovereign debt crisis period and for different levels of financial development in the countries under study. Such an application in the respective European banking setting is unique. The proposed method also copes with common misspecification problems observed in regression models based on efficiency scores. The results have important policy implications for the Euro area, as they indicate the existence of a periphery efficiency meta-frontier. Liquidity and credit risk are found to negatively affect banks productivity, whereas capital and profit risk have a positive impact on their performance. The crisis period is found to augment these effects, while bank-risk variables affect more banks' efficiency when lower levels of financial development are observed.

In this paper a hybrid Genetic Algorithm -Support Vector Regression (GA-SVR) model in economic forecasting and macroeconomic variable selection is introduced. The proposed algorithm is applied to the task of forecasting the US inflation and unemployment. The GA-SVR genetically optimizes the SVR parameters and adapts to the optimal feature subset from a feature space of potential inputs. The feature space includes a wide pool of macroeconomic variables that might affect the two series under study.

In this study a Krill Herd-Support Vector Regression (KH-vSVR) model is introduced. The Krill Herd (KH) algorithm is a novel metaheuristic optimization technique inspired by the behaviour of krill herds. The KH optimizes the SVR parameters by balancing the search between local and global optima. The proposed model is applied to the task of forecasting and trading three commodity Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) on a daily basis over the period 2012-2014. The inputs of the KH-vSVR models are selected through the Model Confidence Set (MCS) from a large pool of linear predictors. The KH-vSVR's statistical and trading performance is benchmarked against traditionally adjusted SVR structures and the best linear predictor. In addition to a simple strategy, a time-varying leverage trading strategy is applied based on Heterogeneous Autoregressive (HAR) volatility estimations. It is shown that the KH-vSVR outperforms its counterparts in terms of statistical accuracy and trading efficiency, while the leverage strategy is found to be successful.

Stock market prediction using evolutionary support vector machines: an application to the ASE20 index. European Journal of Finance, 22(12), pp. 1145Finance, 22(12), pp. -1163Finance, 22(12), pp. . (doi:10.1080Finance, 22(12), pp. /1351847X.2015 This is the author's final accepted version.There may be differences between this version and the published version. Stock Market Prediction Using Evolutionary Support Vector Machines:An Application to the ASE20 Index Georgios Sermpinis Andreas KarathanasopoulosSovan Mitra Charalampos Stasinakis Abstract. The main motivation for this paper is to introduce a novel hybrid method for the prediction of the directional movement of financial assets with an application to the ASE20 Greek stock index. Specifically, we use an alternative computational methodology named Evolutionary Support Vector Machine (ESVM) Stock Predictor for modeling and trading the ASE20 Greek stock index extending the universe of the examined inputs to include autoregressive inputs and moving averages of the ASE20 index and other four financial indices. The proposed hybrid method consists of a combination of genetic algorithms with support vector machines modified to uncover effective short term trading models and overcome the limitations of existing methods. For comparison purposes, the trading performance of the ESVM stock predictor is benchmarked with four traditional strategies (a Naïve strategy, a buy and hold strategy, a MACD and an ARMA models), and a MLP neural network model. As it turns out, the proposed methodology produces a higher trading performance, even during the financial crisis period, in terms of annualized return and information ratio, while providing information about the relationship between the ASE20 index and DAX30, NIKKEI225, FTSE100, S&P500 indices.

In this paper, two different Locally Weighted Support Vector Regression (wSVR) algorithms are generated and applied to the task of forecasting and trading five European Exchange Traded Funds. The trading application covers the recent European Monetary Union debt crisis. The performance of the proposed models is benchmarked against traditional Support Vector Regression (SVR) models. The Radial Basis Function, the Wavelet and the Mahalanobis kernel are explored and tested as SVR kernels. Finally, a novel statistical SVR input selection procedure is introduced based on a principal component analysis and the Hansen et al. (2011) model confidence test. The results demonstrate the superiority of the wSVR models over the traditional SVRs and of the v-SVR over the ε-SVR algorithms. We note that the performance of all models varies and considerably deteriorates in the peak of the debt crisis. In terms of the kernels, our results do not confirm the belief that the Radial Basis Function is the optimum choice for financial series.

Supply Chain Finance (SCF) has gradually taken on digital characteristics with the rapid development of electronic information technology. Business audit information has become more abundant and complex, which has increased the efficiency and increased the potential risk of commercial banks, with credit risk being the biggest risk they face. Therefore, credit risk assessment based on the application of digital SCF is of great importance to commercial banks’ financial decisions. This paper uses a hybrid Extreme Gradient Boosting Multi-Layer Perceptron (XGBoost-MLP) model to assess the credit risk of Digital SCF (DSCF). In this paper, 1357 observations from 85 Chinese-listed SMEs over the period 2016–2019 are selected as the empirical sample, and the important features of credit risk assessment in DSCF are automatically selected through the feature selection of the XGBoost model in the first stage, then followed by credit risk assessment through the MLP in the second stage. Based on the empirical results, we find that the XGBoost-MLP model has good performance in credit risk assessment, where XGBoost feature selection is important for the credit risk assessment model. From the perspective of DSCF, the results show that the inclusion of digital features improves the accuracy of credit risk assessment in SCF.

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This paper attempts to investigate if adopting accurate forecasts from Neural Network (NN) models can lead to statistical and economically significant benefits in portfolio management decisions. In order to achieve that, three NNs, namely the Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and the Psi Sigma Network (PSN), are applied to the task of forecasting the daily returns of three Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). The statistical and trading performance of the NNs is benchmarked with the traditional Autoregressive Moving Average (ARMA) models. Next, a novel dynamic asymmetric copula model (NNC) is introduced in order to capture the dependence structure across ETF returns. Based on the above, weekly re-balanced portfolios are obtained and compared by using the traditional mean-variance and the mean-CVaR portfolio optimization approach. In terms of the results, PSN outperforms all models in statistical and trading terms. Additionally, the asymmetric skewed t copula statistically outperforms symmetric copulas when it comes to modelling ETF returns dependence. The proposed NNC model leads to significant improvements in the portfolio optimization process, while forecasting covariance accounting for asymmetric dependence between the ETFs also improves the performance of obtained portfolios.