Combine to compete: improving fiscal forecast accuracy over time

Budget forecasts have become increasingly important as a tool of fiscal management to influence expectations of bond markets and the public at large. The inherent difficulty in projecting macroeconomic variables – together with political bias – thwart the accuracy of budget forecasts. We improve accuracy by combining the forecasts of both private and public agencies for Italy over the period 1993-2012. A weighted combined forecast of the deficit/ ratio is superior to any single forecast. Deficits are hard to predict due to shifting economic conditions and political events. We test and compare predictive accuracy over time and although a weighted combined forecast is robust to breaks, there is no significant improvement over a simple RW model.

Z2Z4-Additive Perdect Codes in Steganography

Steganography is an information hiding application which aims tohide secret data imperceptibly into a cover object. In this paper, we describe anovel coding method based on Z2Z4-additive codes in which data is embeddedby distorting each cover symbol by one unit at most (+-1-steganography). Thismethod is optimal and solves the problem encountered by the most e cientmethods known today, concerning the treatment of boundary values. Theperformance of this new technique is compared with that of the mentionedmethods and with the well-known rate-distortion upper bound to conclude thata higher payload can be obtained for a given distortion by using the proposedmethod.

Security, Privacy and Anonymity in Legal Distribution of Copyrighted Multimedia Content over Peer-to-Peer Networks: A Brief Overview

Peer-reviewed