# Tag Info

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Because of: The (extreme) dominance of noise over signal The prevalence of non-repeating patterns (many of which we know are not going to repeat) A pathetic sample size for cross-validation Regime changes due to exogenous events. These are typically in the cross-val window which makes it even worse. (GFC, financial integration, trade law changes, interest ...

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1. Determine Factors Economically, the use of factor models can be either motivated using the ICAPM or the APT. Although there are some theoretical differences between the model, for empirical and practical work these differences are irrelevant. In the end, both models stipulate that returns and expected returns are linear functions of the factors: $$r_{i,... 16 Then for each month t, you run a cross-section regression: r_{i,t} = \lambda_0 + \hat{\beta}_i {\lambda}_t + \alpha_{i,t} Where: \hat{\beta}_i \equiv [\beta_{i, MktRf}, \beta_{i, SMB}, \beta_{i, HML}]', is a vector of the coefficients estimated on the first step. What you are looking for is to estimate the vector of \hat{\lambda}_t \equiv [\... 13 Jennifer Bender of MSCI Barra has a paper from 2007 entitled: To Beta or Not to Beta: A Comparison of Historical Versus Fundamental Betas for Hedging Market Risk She deals specifically and exclusively with which method is superior for hedging long-only portfolios. Not surprisingly, she finds that Barra's approach is better. She tests long-only and long-... 12 The regression requires orthogonalization of factors. However, we need to maintain the interpretation of factors (so PCA and Factor Analysis are out). Also, we could apply an iterative method (indeed this is very common practice) but this will bias the factor loadings on the sequence of factors. Best approach is that of Klein and Chow in their paper ... 10 A few thoughts. Yes, your return series are autocorrelated (i.e., stocks don't exactly follow a random walk), so you should use Newey-West standard errors. If you do this as a univariate regression$$R_{i,t} = \alpha_i + \beta_i R_{j,t-1} + \epsilon_{i,t}$$then there's almost certainly an omitted variable inside \epsilon that is moving both R_i and ... 10 The following paper (and the references given within) focuses on the practical aspects of implementation of factor-based investing and gives an overarching framework for the more technical answers here: Practical Considerations for Factor-Based Asset Allocation by Kang, X. (Standard & Poor's), Ung, D. (Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst ... 9 I was just like you when I started out: I had learned a lot about machine learning (mainly neural networks and genetic algorithms/programming) and used it heavily. I also had learned about classic statistics but not nearly as much as about ML. The problem with ML is - as I see it today - that you are often taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut, meaning: ... 8 It appears that you are re-running the regression with each new data point. Instead, you should use an update/online formula (see an excellent answer by the famous Dr. Huber at stats.se). You can find an implementation in the R package biglm. If it doesn't have all the features you need (no windowing out of old data) you can at least adapt it and use it ... 8 Glad you've asked :) Technically speaking, in factor model \alpha stays for return or risk premia, which asset pays when all factor returns are zero. Then, to answer question in more details, we have to specify, are we dealing in our model with return (R_i for asset i) or with risk premia over risk free (R_i-R_f). In the first case, ... 8 The two step Fama-Macbeth regression works as follows: First, run a cross sectional regression in each period. I believe that you want to estimate risk premia for each of the Fama and French factors. Therefore you run:$$r_{i,t} = \lambda_{t,MKT} \hat{\beta}_{i,MKT}+\lambda_{t,HML} \hat{\beta}_{i,HML}+\lambda_{t,SMB} \hat{\beta}_{i,SMB}+ \alpha_{i,t} \quad ...

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Alphas from a time-series regression are error terms in the cross-sectional, linear relationship between expected returns and factor betas. If a factor model were correct those error terms (the alphas) would be zero. Discussion A carefully written version of a standard time-series regression of returns in excess of the risk free rate on market excess ...

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Define excess return $r^x_{it} = r_{it} - r^f_{t}$ as the return $i$ minus the risk free rate, and $f_{jt}$ similarly denotes the excess return of factor $j$ at time $t$. Let's say we have some factor model of returns where: $$r^x_{it} = \alpha_i + \sum_j \beta_{i,j} f_{jt} + \epsilon_{it}$$ F-test / GRS Test If we assume the error terms $\epsilon_{it}$ ...

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This question was ultimately answered on Cross Validated Here are a couple of articles that deal with this subject: Britten-Jones and Neuberger, Improved inference and estimation in regression with overlapping observations Harri & Brorsen, The Overlapping Data Problem

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It's probably because of the strong long-standing statistical underpinnings in economics and econometrics, and overall, risk prediction. For example, look at current research with fat-tail distributions and calculations for Expected Tail Loss (ETL), etc. These studies fit Student's t, Normal, Stable, and Pareto probability distributions to data and report ...

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Regression analysis, as a minimization of the sum of squared errors, does not require normality of the error term. The requirements are that errors are homoscedastic and uncorrelated. And these are the fundamental assumptions (together with exogeneity). Then estimators are unbiased, optimal (exhibit the minimum variance within the class of unbiased ...

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I basically agree with @John, let me expand: We want to model $y$ using a simple linear model, the most basic setup is $$y = c + \mathbf{X}\beta$$ with $y$ the $N$ observations, $c$ a constant, $\mathbf{X}$ the $N \times M$ matrix of regressors and $\beta$ a $M$-dimensional vector of coefficients. This model has $M$ parameters, the elements of $\beta$. ...

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Have you considered fitting ARIMA with exogenous regressors model? Linear regression with autocorrelated errors might be appropriate. R can do this with the arima() function via specifying the xreg argument.

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Time Series Factor modelling is a very good and practical manual to building time series factor models. FactorAnalytics is a very good R package that allows you to fit timeseries, fundamental and statistical factor models. A good reference to factor models would be Chapter 15 of this book.

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There is no a "yes/no answer" to that question. Generally Kalman Filter tends to be better than linear regression, but everything depends on the data which you have, how you calibrate your model. I expect that you have used some library for estimating linear regression parameters. Now you need to think how will you "tune" Kalman filter - the constants F,...

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If you really believed the CAPM's prediction that $\alpha=0$, then imposing $\alpha=0$ in your estimation would indeed lead to your 2nd formula. The problems? The CAPM doesn't work so imposing a false restriction during estimation is problematic. More generally, taking factor models extremely seriously and imposing $\alpha=0$ in estimation to gain ...

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Since you mention beta, I assume you're familiar with the capital asset pricing model (CAPM). The concept is that an asset's expected returns are linearly correlated with the market's returns. Of course, there are other ways "normalize" returns, as you put it. We can extend CAPM with Fama-French, which adds market cap and relative value to the equation. ...

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If the equation satisfies all the assumptions of OLS, particularly homoscedasticity and no autocorrelation in the errors, then the expected return for the equation you laid out is $E[r_{future}|r_{history},x_{news}]=\alpha+\beta_1r_{history}+\beta_2x_{news}+\beta_3r_{history}*x_{news}$ If the unconditional expected return is zero (as is likely to be ...

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Couple points I like to make: There exists no reliable model that can even predict future price returns (risk premiums, excess returns, whatever you want to call it) beyond a year, run as fast as you can if you hear from someone who claims he can predict risk premiums 10 years out, whether reliably or not. It makes zero sense and clearly comes from either a ...

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This isn't exactly what I would call advanced but running each regression on a separate core in a parallel foreach loop would help http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/foreach/foreach.pdf

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I was going to comment but it turned out to be quite elaborate. My experience with certain AI/ML methods is that they're not deterministic. Take RBM for instance, a very wide-spread paradigm. To train such a machine you have two approaches, backpropagation or Kullback-Leibler divergence. Both require you to initialise the machine to a random state. And ...

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This is what Moody's does to calculate default probabilities, but I don't believe they give a whole lot of detail on their exact methodology because they sell their models as software. I quickly found this which gives a brief overview: http://www.moodysanalytics.com/~/media/Brochures/Enterprise-Risk-Solutions/RiskCalc/RiskCalcPlus-Fact-Sheet.ashx Edit- ...

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What you're describing sounds like the reverse of a Fama-Macbeth regression. The original Fama-Macbeth approach estimated rolling time series regressions to get CAPM betas and then doing a cross-sectional regression to estimate the overall sensitivity of returns to beta. If I were to write down what the model looks like, I think you're talking about ...

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There is no magic in the Kalman Filter. The linear regression model usually assumes the coefficients follow a random walk and as such it essentially boils down to an estimation followed by exponential smoothing of the coefficients.

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Preliminary The empirical finding of a strong negative cross-sectional relation between idiosyncratic volatility and future stock returns is highly inconsistent with the predictions of all theoretical models and therefore known as the idiosyncratic volatility (IVOL) puzzle. This phenomenon is also persuasive in international stock markets, as shown in Ang ...

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