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Classical finance models are based on the premise that investors act rationally and utilize all available information when making portfolio decisions. However, these models often fail to capture the anomalies observed in intertemporal choices and decision-making under uncertainty, particularly when accounting for individual differences in preferences and consumption patterns. Such limitations hinder traditional finance theory's ability to address key questions like: How do personal preferences shape investment choices? What drives investor behaviour? And how do individuals select their portfolios? One prominent contribution is Pompian's model of four Behavioral Investor Types (BITs), which links behavioural finance studies with Keirsey's temperament theory, highlighting the role of personality in financial decision-making. Yet, traditional parametric models struggle to capture how these distinct temperaments influence intertemporal decisions, such as how individuals evaluate trade-offs between present and future outcomes. To address this gap, the present study employs Functional Data Analysis (FDA) to specifically investigate temporal discounting behaviours revealing nuanced patterns in how different temperaments perceive and manage uncertainty over time. Our findings show heterogeneity within each temperament, suggesting that investor profiles are far more diverse than previously thought. This refined classification provides deeper insights into the role of temperament in shaping intertemporal financial decisions, offering practical implications for financial advisors to better tailor strategies to individual risk preferences and decision-making styles.

The positioning of this research falls within the scalar-on-function classification literature, a field of significant interest across various domains, particularly in statistics, mathematics, and computer science. This study introduces an advanced methodology for supervised classification by integrating Functional Data Analysis (FDA) with tree-based ensemble techniques for classifying high-dimensional time series. The proposed framework, Enriched Functional Tree-Based Classifiers (EFTCs), leverages derivative and geometric features, benefiting from the diversity inherent in ensemble methods to further enhance predictive performance and reduce variance. While our approach has been tested on the enrichment of Functional Classification Trees (FCTs), Functional K-NN (FKNN), Functional Random Forest (FRF), Functional XGBoost (FXGB), and Functional LightGBM (FLGBM), it could be extended to other tree-based and non-tree-based classifiers, with appropriate considerations emerging from this investigation. Through extensive experimental evaluations on seven real-world datasets and six simulated scenarios, this proposal demonstrates fascinating improvements over traditional approaches, providing new insights into the application of FDA in complex, high-dimensional learning problems.

This paper introduces a novel supervised classification strategy that integrates functional data analysis (FDA) with tree-based methods, addressing the challenges of high-dimensional data and enhancing the classification performance of existing functional classifiers. Specifically, we propose augmented versions of functional classification trees and functional random forests, incorporating a new tool for assessing the importance of functional principal components. This tool provides an ad-hoc method for determining unbiased permutation feature importance in functional data, particularly when dealing with correlated features derived from successive derivatives. Our study demonstrates that these additional features can significantly enhance the predictive power of functional classifiers. Experimental evaluations on both real-world and simulated datasets showcase the effectiveness of the proposed methodology, yielding promising results compared to existing methods., Comment: 33 pages

The advent of big data has raised significant challenges in analysing high-dimensional datasets across various domains such as medicine, ecology, and economics. Functional Data Analysis (FDA) has proven to be a robust framework for addressing these challenges, enabling the transformation of high-dimensional data into functional forms that capture intricate temporal and spatial patterns. However, despite advancements in functional classification methods and very high performance demonstrated by combining FDA and ensemble methods, a critical gap persists in the literature concerning the transparency and interpretability of black-box models, e.g. Functional Random Forests (FRF). In response to this need, this paper introduces a novel suite of explainability tools to illuminate the inner mechanisms of FRF. We propose using Functional Partial Dependence Plots (FPDPs), Functional Principal Component (FPC) Probability Heatmaps, various model-specific and model-agnostic FPCs' importance metrics, and the FPC Internal-External Importance and Explained Variance Bubble Plot. These tools collectively enhance the transparency of FRF models by providing a detailed analysis of how individual FPCs contribute to model predictions. By applying these methods to an ECG dataset, we demonstrate the effectiveness of these tools in revealing critical patterns and improving the explainability of FRF., Comment: 33 pages

Social network analysis (SNA) helps us understand the relationships and interactions between individuals, groups, organizations, or other social entities. In the literature, ties are generally considered binary or weighted based on their strength. Nonetheless, when the actors are individuals, these relationships are often imprecise, and identifying them with simple scalars leads to information loss. Indeed, social relationships are often vague in real life, and although previous research has proposed the use of fuzzy networks, these are typically characterized by crisp ties. The use of weighted links does not align with the original philosophy of fuzzy logic, which instead aims to preserve the vagueness inherent in human language and real life. For this reason, this paper proposes a generalization of the so-called Fuzzy Social Network Analysis (FSNA) to the context of imprecise relationships among actors. Dealing with imprecise ties and introducing fuzziness in the definition of relationships requires an extension of social network analysis, defining ties as fuzzy numbers instead of crisp values and extending classical centrality indices to fuzzy centrality indexes. The article presents the theory and application of real data collected through a fascinating mouse-tracking technique to study the fuzzy relationships in a collaboration network among the members of a university department., Comment: 24 pages