Cheng Peng

The Neyman-Pearson region of a simple binary hypothesis testing is the set of points whose coordinates represent the false positive rate and false negative rate of some test. The lower boundary of this region is given by the Neyman-Pearson lemma, and is up to a coordinate change, equivalent to the optimal ROC curve. We establish a novel lower bound for the boundary in terms of any $f$-divergence. Since the bound generated by hockey-stick $f$-divergences characterizes the Neyman-Pearson boundary, this bound is best possible. In the case of KL divergence, this bound improves Pinsker's inequality. Furthermore, we obtain a closed-form refined upper bound for the Neyman-Pearson boundary in terms of the Chernoff $α$-coefficient. Finally, we present methods for constructing pairs of distributions that can approximately or exactly realize any given Neyman-Pearson boundary.

This paper proposes a new approach to estimating the distribution of a response variable conditioned on observing some factors. The proposed approach possesses desirable properties of flexibility, interpretability, tractability and extendability. The conditional quantile function is modeled by a mixture (weighted sum) of basis quantile functions, with the weights depending on factors. The calibration problem is formulated as a convex optimization problem. It can be viewed as conducting quantile regressions for all confidence levels simultaneously while avoiding quantile crossing by definition. The calibration problem is equivalent to minimizing the continuous ranked probability score (CRPS). Based on the canonical polyadic (CP) decomposition of tensors, we propose a dimensionality reduction method that reduces the rank of the parameter tensor and propose an alternating algorithm for estimation. Additionally, based on Risk Quadrangle framework, we generalize the approach to conditional distributions defined by Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR), expectile and other functions of uncertainty measures. Although this paper focuses on using splines as the weight functions, it can be extended to neural networks. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

This paper uses simulation-based portfolio optimization to mitigate the left tail risk of the portfolio. The contribution is twofold. (i) We propose the Markov regime-switching GARCH model with multivariate normal tempered stable innovation (MRS-MNTS-GARCH) to accommodate fat tails, volatility clustering and regime switch. The volatility of each asset independently follows the regime-switch GARCH model, while the correlation of joint innovation of the GARCH models follows the Hidden Markov Model. (ii) We use tail risk measures, namely conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) and conditional drawdown-at-risk (CDaR), in the portfolio optimization. The optimization is performed with the sample paths simulated by the MRS-MNTS-GARCH model. We conduct an empirical study on the performance of optimal portfolios. Out-of-sample tests show that the optimal portfolios with tail measures outperform the optimal portfolio with standard deviation measure and the equally weighted portfolio in various performance measures. The out-of-sample performance of the optimal portfolios is also more robust to suboptimality on the efficient frontier.

This paper uses simulation-based portfolio optimization to mitigate the left tail risk of the portfolio. The contribution is twofold. (i) We propose the Markov regime-switching GARCH model with multivariate normal tempered stable innovation (MRS-MNTS-GARCH) to accommodate fat tails, volatility clustering and regime switch. The volatility of each asset independently follows the regime-switch GARCH model, while the correlation of joint innovation of the GARCH models follows the Hidden Markov Model. (ii) We use tail risk measures, namely conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) and conditional drawdown-at-risk (CDaR), in the portfolio optimization. The optimization is performed with the sample paths simulated by the MRS-MNTS-GARCH model. We conduct an empirical study on the performance of optimal portfolios. Out-of-sample tests show that the optimal portfolios with tail measures outperform the optimal portfolio with standard deviation measure and the equally weighted portfolio in various performance measures. The out-of-sample performance of the optimal portfolios is also more robust to suboptimality on the efficient frontier.