This book integrates the fundamentals of asymptotic theory of statistical inference for time series under nonstandard settings, e.g., infinite variance processes, not only from the point of view of efficiency but also from that of robustness and optimality by minimizing prediction error. This is the first book to consider the generalized empirical likelihood applied to time series models in frequency domain and also the estimation motivated by minimizing quantile prediction error without assumption of true model. It provides the reader with a new horizon for understanding the prediction problem that occurs in time series modeling and a contemporary approach of hypothesis testing by the generalized empirical likelihood method. Nonparametric aspects of the methods proposed in this book also satisfactorily address economic and financial problems without imposing redundantly strong restrictions on the model, which has been true until now. Dealing with infinite variance processes makes analysis of economic and financial data more accurate under the existing results from the demonstrative research. The scope of applications, however, is expected to apply to much broader academic fields. The methods are also sufficiently flexible in that they represent an advanced and unified development of prediction form including multiple-point extrapolation, interpolation, and other incomplete past forecastings. Consequently, they lead readers to a good combination of efficient and robust estimate and test, and discriminate pivotal quantities contained in realistic time series models.

This book compiles theoretical developments on statistical inference for time series and related models in honor of Masanobu Taniguchi's 70th birthday. It covers models such as long-range dependence models, nonlinear conditionally heteroscedastic time series, locally stationary processes, integer-valued time series, Lévy Processes, complex-valued time series, categorical time series, exclusive topic models, and copula models. Many cutting-edge methods such as empirical likelihood methods, quantile regression, portmanteau tests, rank-based inference, change-point detection, testing for the goodness-of-fit, higher-order asymptotic expansion, minimum contrast estimation, optimal transportation, and topological methods are proposed, considered, or applied to complex data based on the statistical inference for stochastic processes. The performances of these methods are illustrated by a variety of data analyses. This collection of original papers provides the reader with comprehensive and state-of-the-art theoretical works on time series and related models. It contains deep and profound treatments of the asymptotic theory of statistical inference. In addition, many specialized methodologies based on the asymptotic theory are presented in a simple way for a wide variety of statistical models. This Festschrift finds its core audiences in statistics, signal processing, and econometrics.

Quantile estimation of time-to-event data plays a key role in many medical applications, especially conditional on covariates of interest. In such settings, bias due to model misspecification is an important concern. As such, Empirical Likelihood (EL) is a particularly attractive estimation approach, making minimal parametric modeling assumptions without unduly compromising statistical efficiency. However, observed survival times are typically subject to right-censoring, in which case most EL approaches cannot be applied directly. In this thesis, we revisit a widely-applicable Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm for right-censored EL. As the covariate-free EL function becomes discontinuous in the conditional setting, we propose a continuity correction for which the computational properties of EM are retained. Several approaches to obtaining confidence intervals are explored. We provide an implementation of our method and related algorithms in the R package flexEL. The source code is written in C++ for high computational performance, and a straightforward interface allows users to fit arbitrary EL models with little programming effort.

Empirical Likelihood Method in Survival Analysis explains how to use the empirical likelihood method for right censored survival data. The author uses R for calculating empirical likelihood and includes many worked out examples with the associated R code. The datasets and code are available for download on his website and CRAN. The book focuses on all the standard survival analysis topics treated with empirical likelihood, including hazard functions, cumulative distribution functions, analysis of the Cox model, and computation of empirical likelihood for censored data. It also covers semi-parametric accelerated failure time models, the optimality of confidence regions derived from empirical likelihood or plug-in empirical likelihood ratio tests, and several empirical likelihood confidence band results. While survival analysis is a classic area of statistical study, the empirical likelihood methodology has only recently been developed. Until now, just one book was available on empirical likelihood and most statistical software did not include empirical likelihood procedures. Addressing this shortfall, this book provides the functions to calculate the empirical likelihood ratio in survival analysis as well as functions related to the empirical likelihood analysis of the Cox regression model and other hazard regression models.

​This monograph provides the fundamentals of statistical inference for financial engineering and covers some selected methods suitable for analyzing financial time series data. In order to describe the actual financial data, various stochastic processes, e.g. non-Gaussian linear processes, non-linear processes, long-memory processes, locally stationary processes etc. are introduced and their optimal estimation is considered as well. This book also includes several statistical approaches, e.g., discriminant analysis, the empirical likelihood method, control variate method, quantile regression, realized volatility etc., which have been recently developed and are considered to be powerful tools for analyzing the financial data, establishing a new bridge between time series and financial engineering. This book is well suited as a professional reference book on finance, statistics and statistical financial engineering. Readers are expected to have an undergraduate-level knowledge of statistics.