Seminars 2008 — Abstracts

Friday, April 4

Speaker: Dick van Dijk, Rotterdam

Title: Partial Likelihood-Based Scoring Rules for Evaluating Density Forecasts in Tails

Abstract: We propose new scoring rules based on partial likelihood for assessing the relative out-of-sample predictive accuracy of competing density forecasts over a specific region of interest, such as the left tail in financial risk management. By construction, conventional scoring rules based on the Kullback–Leibler Information Criterion or censored normal likelihood favor density forecasts with more probability mass in the given region, rendering predictive accuracy tests biased towards such densities. Our novel partial likelihood-based scoring rules do not suffer from this problem, as illustrated by means of Monte Carlo simulations and an empirical application to daily S&P 500 index returns.