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The covariance matrix estimation plays an important role in portfolio optimization and risk management. It is well-known that portfolio is essentially a convex quadratic programming problem, which is also a special case of symmetric cone optimization. Accurate covariance matrix estimation will lead to more reasonable asset weight allocation. However, some existing methods do not consider the influence of time-varying factor on the covariance matrix estimations. To remedy this, in this article, we propose an improved dynamic conditional correlation model (DCC) by using nonconvex optimization model under smoothly clipped absolute deviation and hard-threshold penalty functions. We first construct a nonconvex optimization model to obtain the optimal covariance matrix estimation, and then we use this covariance matrix estimation to replace the unconditional covariance matrix in the DCC model. The result shows that the loss of the proposed estimator is smaller than other variants of the DCC model in numerical experiments. Finally, we apply our proposed model to the classic Markowitz portfolio. The results show that the improved dynamic conditional correlation model performs better than the current DCC models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The estimation of the covariance matrix is an important topic in the field of multivariate statistical analysis. In this paper, we propose a new estimator, which is a convex combination of the linear shrinkage estimation and the rotation-invariant estimator under the Frobenius norm. We first obtain the optimal parameters by using grid search and cross-validation, and then, we use these optimal parameters to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed estimation in the numerical simulations. Finally, in empirical research, we apply the covariance matrix estimation to the portfolio optimization. Compared to the existing estimators, we show that the proposed estimator has better performance and lower out-of-sample risk in portfolio optimization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]