Mathematical Methods For Financial

The interaction between mathematicians, statisticians and econometricians working in actuarial sciences and finance is producing numerous meaningful scientific results. This volume introduces new ideas, in the form of four-page papers, presented at the international conference Mathematical and Statistical Methods for Actuarial Sciences and Finance (MAF), held at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Spain), 4th-6th April 2018.

The origin of this book can be traced to courses on financial mathemat­ ics taught by us at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Warsaw University of Technology (Politechnika Warszawska) and Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble. Our initial aim was to write a short text around the material used in two one-semester graduate courses attended by students with diverse disciplinary backgrounds (mathematics, physics, computer sci­ ence, engineering, economics and commerce).

The interaction between mathematicians and statisticians reveals to be an effective approach for dealing with actuarial, insurance and financial problems, both in an academic and in an operative perspective. The international conference MAF 2008, held at the University Ca’ Foscari of Venezia (Italy) in 2008, had precisely this purpose, and the collection here published gathers a selection of about the one hundred papers presented at the conference and successively referred and reviewed to this aim. They cover a wide variety of subjects in actuarial, insurance and financial fields, all treated in light of the successful cooperation between the two quantitative approaches.

This book offers an overview of state-of-the-art econometric techniques, with a special emphasis on financial econometrics. There is a major need for such techniques, since the traditional way of designing mathematical models – based on researchers’ insights – can no longer keep pace with the ever-increasing data flow.

Given the explosion of interest in mathematical methods for solving problems in finance and trading, a great deal of research and development is taking place in universities, large brokerage firms, and in the supporting trading software industry. Mathematical advances have been made both analytically and numerically in finding practical solutions.