This article reviews the literature on sparse high-dimensional models and discusses some applications in economics and finance. Recent developments in theory, methods, and implementations in penalized least-squares and penalized likelihood methods are highlighted. These variable selection methods are effective in sparse high-dimensional modeling. The limits of dimensionality that regularization methods can handle, the role of penalty functions, and their statistical properties are detailed. Some recent advances in sparse ultra-high-dimensional modeling are also briefly discussed.

The estimation of large covariance and precision matrices is fundamental in modern multivariate analysis. However, problems arise from the statistical analysis of large panel economic and financial data. The covariance matrix reveals marginal correlations between variables, while the precision matrix encodes conditional correlations between pairs of variables given the remaining variables. In this paper, we provide a selective review of several recent developments on the estimation of large covariance and precision matrices. We focus on two general approaches: a rankbased method and a factormodelbased method. Theories and applications of both approaches are presented. These methods are expected to be widely applicable to the analysis of economic and financial data.

This paper gives a brief overview of the nonparametric techniques that are useful for financial econometric problems. The problems include estimation and inference for instantaneous returns and volatility functions of time-homogeneous and time-dependent diffusion processes, and estimation of transition densities and state price densities. We first briefly describe the problems and then outline the main techniques and main results. Some useful probabilistic aspects of diffusion processes are also briefly summarized to facilitate our presentation and applications.

The varying coefficient models are very important tool to explore the dynamic pattern in many scientific areas, such as economics, finance, politics, epidemiology, medical science, ecology and so on. They are natural extensions of classical parametric models with good interpretability and are becoming more and more popular in data analysis. Thanks to their flexibility and interpretability, in the past ten years, the varying coefficient models have experienced deep and exciting developments on methodological, theoretical and applied sides. This paper gives a selective overview on the major methodological and theoretical developments on the varying coefficient models.

We present an evolution method for designing the styling curves of garments. The procedure of evolution is driven by aesthetics-inspired scores to evaluate the quality of styling designs, where the aesthetic considerations are represented in the form of streamlines on human bodies. A dual representation is introduced in our platform to process the styling curves of designs, based on which robust methods for realizing the operations of evolution are developed. Starting from a given set of styling designs on human bodies, we demonstrate the effectiveness of set evolution inspired by aesthetic factors. The evolution is adaptive to the change of aesthetic inspirations. By this adaptation, our platform can automatically generate new designs fulfilling the demands of variations in different human bodies and poses.