The field of financial engineering has developed as a huge integration of economics, mathematics, probability theory, statistics, time series analysis, operation research, and so forth over the last decade. The construction of portfolios for financial assets is one of the most important issues in financial engineering. It is empirically observed that financial returns are non-Gaussian and dependent and is shown that the classical mean-variance portfolio estimator is not statistically optimal. Knowledge and understanding of these have led to the development of general time series modeling for financial returns, sophisticated optimal estimation theory, robust estimation methods, and various numerical approaches for portfolios (e.g., MCMC method).

We invite investigators to contribute original research articles as well as review articles that will stimulate the continuing efforts to understand the statistical portfolio estimation for non-Gaussian-dependent returns. We are particularly interested in articles proposing new models for financial assets, portfolio estimators, and methods of their calculations. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Recent developments in statistical modeling for financial returns
• Advances in optimal statistical estimation for portfolios
• Role of rank-based statistics and skew-symmetric distribution
• Portfolio estimation under exogenous variables (e.g., wage inflation rate)
• Recent advances in empirical likelihood approach
• Higher-order asymptotic theory for portfolio estimation
• Role of time series factor models
• Bootstrap and MCMC approaches for portfolio estimators
• Levy processes and stochastic volatility models

Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ads/guidelines/. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/ according to the following timetable: