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We develop a statistical model for the analysis and forecasting of football match results which assumes a bivariate Poisson distribution with intensity coefficients that change stochastically over time. The dynamic model is a novelty in the statistical time series analysis of match results in team sports. Our treatment is based on state space and importance sampling methods which are computationally efficient. The out-of-sample performance of our methodology is verified in a betting strategy that is applied to the match outcomes from the 2010–2011 and 2011–2012 seasons of the English football Premier League. We show that our statistical modelling framework can produce a significant positive return over the bookmaker's odds.

We study intraday stochastic volatility for four liquid stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange using a new dynamic Skellam model for high-frequency tick-by-tick discrete price changes. Since the likelihood function is analytically intractable, we rely on numerical methods for its evaluation. Given the high number of observations per series per day (1000 to 10,000), we adopt computationally efficient methods including Monte Carlo integration. The intraday dynamics of volatility and the high number of trades without price impact require nontrivial adjustments to the basic dynamic Skellam model. In-sample residual diagnostics and goodness-of-fit statistics show that the final model provides a good fit to the data. An extensive day-to-day forecasting study of intraday volatility shows that the dynamic modified Skellam model provides accurate forecasts compared to alternative modeling approaches. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

We develop a dynamic model for the intraday dependence between discrete stock price changes. The conditional copula mass function for the integer tick-size price changes has time-varying parameters that are driven by the score of the predictive likelihood function. The marginal distributions are Skellam and also have score-driven time-varying parameters. We show that the integration steps in the copula mass function for large dimensions can be accurately approximated via numerical integration. The resulting computational gains lead to a methodology that can treat high-dimensional applications. Its accuracy is shown by an extensive simulation study. In our empirical application of 10 US bank stocks, we reveal strong evidence of time-varying intraday dependence patterns: Dependence starts at a low level but generally rises during the day. Based on one-step-ahead out-of-sample density forecasting, we find that our new model outperforms benchmarks for intraday dependence such as the cubic spline model, the fixed correlation model, or the rolling average realized correlation.

Experimentation is central to modern digital businesses, but many operational decisions cannot be randomized at the user level. In such cases, cluster-level experiments, where clusters are usually geographic, come to the rescue. However, such experiments often suffer from low power due to persistent cluster heterogeneity, strong seasonality, and autocorrelated outcome metrics, as well as common shocks that move many clusters simultaneously. On an example of airline pricing - where policies are typically applied at the route level and thus the A/B test unit of analysis is a route - we study switchback designs to remedy these problems. In switchback designs, each cluster (route in our case) alternates between treatment and control on a fixed schedule, creating within-route contrasts that mitigate time-invariant heterogeneity and reduce sensitivity to low-frequency noise. We provide a unified Two-Way Fixed Effects interpretation of switchback experiments that makes the identifying variation explicit after partialling out route and time effects, clarifying how switching cadence interacts with temporal dependence to determine precision. Empirically, we evaluate weekly and daily switchback cadences using calibrated synthetic regimes and operational airline data from ancillary pricing. In our evaluations, switchbacks decrease standard errors by up to 67%, with daily switching yielding the largest gains over short horizons and weekly switching offering a strong and simpler-to-operationalize alternative.

We study an alternative approach to determine the final league table in football competitions with a premature ending. For several countries, a premature ending of the 2019/2020 football season has occurred due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We propose a model-based method as a possible alternative to the use of the incomplete standings to determine the final table. This method measures the performance of the teams in the matches of the season that have been played and predicts the remaining non-played matches through a paired-comparison model. The main advantage of the method compared to the incomplete standings is that it takes account of the bias in the performance measure due to the schedule of the matches in a season. Therefore, the resulting ranking of the teams based on our proposed method can be regarded as more fair in this respect. A forecasting study based on historical data of seven of the main European competitions is used to validate the method. The empirical results suggest that the model-based approach produces more accurate predictions of the true final standings than those based on the incomplete standings.

We develop a multivariate unobserved components model to extract business cycle and financial cycle indicators from a panel of economic and financial time series of four large developed economies. Our model is flexible and allows for the inclusion of cycle components in different selections of economic variables with different scales and with possible phase shifts. We find clear evidence of the presence of a financial cycle with a length that is approximately twice the length of a regular business cycle. Moreover, cyclical movements in credit related variables largely depend on the financial cycle, and only marginally on the business cycle. Property prices appear to have their own idiosyncratic dynamics and do not substantially load on business or financial cycle components. Systemic surveillance policies should therefore account for the different dynamic components in typical macro financial variables.