Abstract

The Birnbaum-Saunders distribution is receiving considerable attention due to its good properties. One of its extensions is the class of scale-mixture Birnbaum-Saunders (SBS) distributions, which shares its good properties, but it also has further properties. The autoregressive conditional duration models are the primary family used for analyzing high-frequency financial data. We propose a methodology based on SBS autoregressive conditional duration models, which includes in-sample inference, goodness-of-fit and out-of-sample forecast techniques. We carry out a Monte Carlo study to evaluate its performance and assess its practical usefulness with real-world data of financial transactions from the New York stock exchange. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.