The aim of this paper is to use the General Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedastic (GARCH) type models for the estimation of volatility of the daily returns of the Kenyan stock market: that is Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE). The conditional variance is estimated using the data from March 2013 to February 2016. We use both symmetric and asymmetric models to capture the most common features of the stock markets like leverage effect and volatility clustering. The results show that the volatility process is highly persistent, thus, giving evidence of the existence of risk premium for the NSE index return series. This in turn supports the positive correlation hypothesis: that is between volatility and expected stock returns. Another fact revealed by the results is that the asymmetric GARCH models provide better fit for NSE than the symmetric models. This proves the presence of leverage effect in the NSE return series.

Process capability indices (PCIs) quantify the ability of a process to produce on target and within specifications performances. Basic indices designed for normal processes gives flawed results for non-normal process. Numerous methods have been proposed for non-normal processes to estimate PCIs in which some of them are based on transformation methods. The Johnson system comprising three types that translate a continuous non-normal distribution to normal. The aim of this paper is to estimate four basic indices for non-normal process using Johnson system with single straightforward procedure. The efficacy of the proposed approach can be assessed for all three

Process capability analysis is used to determine the process performance as capable or incapable within a specified tolerance. Basic indices C p , C pk , C pm , C pmk initially developed for normally distributed processes showed inappropriate for processes with non-normal distributions. A number of authors worked on non-normal distributions which were most notably those of Clements, Pearn and Chen, Montgomery and Johnson-Kotz-Pearn (JKP). Obtaining PCIs based on the parameters of non-normal distributions are completely disregarded and ignored. However parameters of some non-normal distributions have significance for knowing the status of process as capable or incapable. In this article we intend to work on the shape parameter of Weibull distribution to calculate PCIs. We work on two data sets for verification and validation purpose. Efficacy of the technique is assessed by bootstrapping the results of estimate and standard error of shape parameter.

No abstract

Kurtosis is a commonly used descriptive statistics. Kurtosis “Coefficient of excess” is critically reviewed in different aspects and is called as, measuring the fatness of the tails of the density functions, concentration towards the central value, scattering away from the target point or degree of peakedness of probability distribution. Kurtosis is referred to the shape of the distribution but many distributions having same kurtosis value may have different shapes while Kurtosis may exist when peak of a distribution is not in existence. Through extensive study of kurtosis on several distributions, Wu (2002) introduced a new measure called “W-Peakedness” that offers a fine capture of distribution shape to provide an intuitive measure of peakedness of the distribution which is inversely proportional to the standard deviation of the distribution. In this paper the work is extended for different others continuous probability distributions. Empirical results through simulation illustrate the proposed method to evaluate kurtosis by W-peakedness