Univariate and multivariate analyses of the asset returns using new statistical models and penalized regression techniques

The COVID-19 epidemic has had a profound effect on almost every aspect of daily life, including the financial sector, education, transportation, health care, and so on. Among these sectors, the financial and health sectors are the most affected areas by COVID-19. Modeling and predicting the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic on the financial and health care sectors is particularly important these days. Therefore, this paper has two aims, (i) to introduce a new probability distribution for modeling the financial data set (oil prices data), and (ii) to implement a machine learning approach to predict the oil prices. First, we introduce a new approach for developing new probability distributions for the univariate analysis of the oil price data. The proposed approach is called a new reduced exponential- $X$ (NRE- $X$) family. Based on this approach, two new statistical distributions are introduced for modeling the oil price data and its log returns. Based on certain statistical tools, we observe that the proposed probability distributions are the best competitors for modeling the prices' data sets. Second, we carry out a multivariate analysis while considering some covariates of oil price data. Dual well-known machine learning algorithms, namely, the least absolute shrinkage and absolute deviation (Lasso) and Elastic net (Enet) are utilized to achieve the important features for oil prices based on the best model. The best model is established through forecasting performance.