Acknowledgements

In addition to Prof. Didier Sornette, who proposed and supported this project, I am indebted to many others.

I am indebted to Dr Vladimir Filimonov for timely feedback, to Prof. Hansruedi Künsch and Spencer Wheatley for useful discussions about the finer points of the model and its uses, and to Prof. Sara van de Geer for supporting this chaos on behalf the Seminar for Statistics.

I am also grateful to Miriam Lyons, Markus Hochuli, Katharina Hugentobler and Aline Ulmer for tolerating my absence during the deadlines, and cooking me dinner anyway.