This monograph provides the fundamentals of statistical inference for financial engineering and covers some selected methods suitable for analyzing financial time series data. In order to describe the actual financial data, various stochastic processes, e.g. non-Gaussian linear processes, non-linear processes, long-memory processes, locally stationary processes etc. are introduced and their optimal estimation is considered as well. This book also includes several statistical approaches, e.g., discriminant analysis, the empirical likelihood method, control variate method, quantile regression, realized volatility etc., which have been recently developed and are considered to be powerful tools for analyzing the financial data, establishing a new bridge between time series and financial engineering.

This book is well suited as a professional reference book on finance, statistics and statistical financial engineering. Readers are expected to have an undergraduate-level knowledge of statistics."

This book contains new aspects of model diagnostics in time series analysis, including variable selection problems and higher-order asymptotics of tests. This is the first book to cover systematic approaches and widely applicable results for nonstandard models including infinite variance processes. The book begins by introducing a unified view of a portmanteau-type test based on a likelihood ratio test, useful to test general parametric hypotheses inherent in statistical models. The conditions for the limit distribution of portmanteau-type tests to be asymptotically pivotal are given under general settings, and very clear implications for the relationships between the parameter of interest and the nuisance parameter are elucidated in terms of Fisher-information matrices. A robust testing procedure against heavy-tailed time series models is also constructed in the context of variable selection problems. The setting is very reasonable in the context of financial data analysis and econometrics, and the result is applicable to causality tests of heavy-tailed time series models. In the last two sections, Bartlett-type adjustments for a class of test statistics are discussed when the parameter of interest is on the boundary of the parameter space. A nonlinear adjustment procedure is proposed for a broad range of test statistics including the likelihood ratio, Wald and score statistics.