Alessio Sancetta

Francesco Cordoni, Alessio Sancetta

A model among many may only be best under certain states of the world. Switching from a model to another can also be costly. Finding a procedure to dynamically choose a model in these circumstances requires to solve a complex estimation procedure and a dynamic programming problem. A Reinforcement learning algorithm is used to approximate and estimate from the data the optimal solution to this dynamic programming problem. The algorithm is shown to consistently estimate the optimal policy that may choose different models based on a set of covariates. A typical example is the one of switching between different portfolio models under rebalancing costs, using macroeconomic information. Using a set of macroeconomic variables and price data, an empirical application to the aforementioned portfolio problem shows superior performance to choosing the best portfolio model with hindsight.

Alessio Sancetta

We consider stationary autoregressive processes with coefficients restricted to an ellipsoid, which includes autoregressive processes with absolutely summable coefficients. We provide consistency results under different norms for the estimation of such processes using constrained and penalized estimators. As an application we show some weak form of universal consistency. Simulations show that directly including the constraint in the estimation can lead to more robust results.