Sometimes, you feel you're spoilt for choice: there are so many good predictors that you could use! Why select and focus on just one? I will review the framework of robust online aggregation (also known as prediction of individual sequences or online aggregation of expert advice). This setting explains how to combine base forecasts provided by ensemble methods. No stochastic modeling is needed and the performance achieved is comparable to the one of the best (constant convex combination of) base forecast(s). I will illustrate the technology on various data sets, including electricity consumption and exchange rates. More importantly, I will point out open issues, both on the theoretical and on the practical sides.[-]

In his 1947 essay, Tjalling Koopmans criticized the development of an empirical science that had no theoretical basis, what he referred to as measurement without theory. The controversy over the status of relations based on mere statistical inference has not ceased since then. Instead of looking for the contemporary consequences, however, I will inquire into its early beginnings. As early as the 1900s, Walras, Pareto and Juglar exchanged views on the status of theory and its relation to economic data. These private exchanges acquired the status of scientific controversy in the aftermath of the First World War, with the dissemination of Pareto's work. It is precisely this moment that I will try to grasp, when engineers began to read and write pure economic treatises, questioning the relation between theory and empirical problems, the nature of their project and the expectations that the subsequent development of economics has tried to fulfill.

Cournot Centre session devoted to the transformations that took place in mathematical economics during the interwar period.[-]

In order to explore the advances made on the economic issue of business cycles, I will present the work of the American economist Henry Ludwell Moore, who published four works on the question between the years 1911 and 1923. Within this framework, I will introduce several issues, such as the duality of empirical and theoretical approaches, the causal and semiological interpretations of the correlation, the notion of the ceteris paribus law in economics, the notion of non-probabilistic statistical mathematics, the development of the notion of the dynamic model at the end of the 1920s, the diverse analysis techniques of chronological series and their artefacts. I will also make reference to the contributions of other actors in this field.

Cournot Centre session devoted to the transformations that took place in mathematical economics during the interwar period.[-]

It is generally admitted that financial time series have heavy tailed marginal distributions. When time series models are fitted on such data, the non-existence of appropriate moments may invalidate standard statistical tools used for inference. Moreover, the existence of moments can be crucial for risk management. This talk considers testing the existence of moments in the framework of standard and augmented GARCH models. In the case of standard GARCH, even-moment conditions involve moments of the independent innovation process. We propose tests for the existence of moments of the returns process that are based on the joint asymptotic distribution of the estimator of the volatility parameters and empirical moments of the residuals. To achieve efficiency gains we consider non Gaussian QML estimators founded on reparametrizations of the GARCH model, and we discuss optimality issues. We also consider augmented GARCH processes, for which moment conditions are less explicit. We establish the asymptotic distribution of the empirical moment Generating function (MGF) of the model, defined as the MGF of the random autoregressive coefficient in the volatility dynamics, from which a test is deduced. An alternative test is based on the estimation of the maximal exponent characterizing the existence of moments. Our results will be illustrated with Monte Carlo experiments and real financial data.[-]