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.


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 contains new aspects of model diagnostics in time series analysis, including variable selection problems and higher-order asymptotics of tests. This is the first book to cover systematic approaches and widely applicable results for nonstandard models including infinite variance processes. The book begins by introducing a unified view of a portmanteau-type test based on a likelihood ratio test, useful to test general parametric hypotheses inherent in statistical models. The conditions for the limit distribution of portmanteau-type tests to be asymptotically pivotal are given under general settings, and very clear implications for the relationships between the parameter of interest and the nuisance parameter are elucidated in terms of Fisher-information matrices. A robust testing procedure against heavy-tailed time series models is also constructed in the context of variable selection problems. The setting is very reasonable in the context of financial data analysis and econometrics, and the result is applicable to causality tests of heavy-tailed time series models. In the last two sections, Bartlett-type adjustments for a class of test statistics are discussed when the parameter of interest is on the boundary of the parameter space. A nonlinear adjustment procedure is proposed for a broad range of test statistics including the likelihood ratio, Wald and score statistics.