The Lorenz system is used to discuss two kinds of predictability: the model sensitivity to inaccurate initial conditions (first kind) and to inaccurate boundary conditions (second kind). The first kind of predictability has been investigated for a long time, but not the second kind. It was found that the Lorenz system has a capability to detect both kinds of predictability since the boundary co...

The relative predictability of returns and dividends is a central issue because it forms the paradigm to interpret asset price variation. A little studied question is how dividend smoothing, as a choice of corporate policy, affects predictability. We show that even if dividends are supposed to be predictable without smoothing, dividend smoothing can bury this predictability. Because aggregate d...

Fluctuations in environmental parameters are increasingly being recognized as essential features of any habitat. The quantification of whether environmental fluctuations are prevalently predictable or unpredictable is remarkably relevant to understanding the evolutionary responses of organisms. However, when characterizing the relevant features of natural habitats, ecologists typically face two...

I examine an investor’s portfolio allocation problem across multiple risky assets in the presence of return predictability when, in addition to the predictability evidence, the investor uses conditional asset pricing models to guide him in the portfolio selection decision. I also explore how the uncertainty associated with the model dynamics affects the investor’s optimal portfolio. To analyze ...

Network models are an increasingly popular way to abstract complex psychological phenomena. While studying the structure of network models has led to many important insights, little attention has been paid to how well they predict observations. This is despite the fact that predictability is crucial for judging the practical relevance of edges: for instance in clinical practice, predictability ...

Participants' eye movements were tracked when reading sentences in which target word predictability was manipulated to being unpredictable from the preceding context, predictable from the sentence preceding the one in which the target word was embedded, or predictable from the adjective directly preceding the target word. Results show that there was no difference in skipping rates between the 2...

100-word speech samples of alcoholic and schizophrenic Ss were examined in order to relate characteristics of these samples to the differential predictability of (a) alcoholic speech under drug versus nondrug conditions (LSD-25), and (b) schizophrenic and alcoholic speech, using the cloze procedure. The deleted words in the samples were identified as to grammatical class form and frequency of u...