Detecting and diagnosing faults in dynamic stochastic distributions using a rational b-splines approximation to output PDFs

Describes the process of detecting and diagnosing faults in dynamic stochastic distributions using a rational b-splines approximation to output PDFs

On the convergence of autonomous agent communities

This is the post-print version of the final published paper that is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2010 IOS Press and the authors.Community is a common phenomenon in natural ecosystems, human societies as well as artificial multi-agent systems such as those in web and Internet based applications. In many self-organizing systems, communities are formed evolutionarily in a decentralized way through agents' autonomous behavior. This paper systematically investigates the properties of a variety of the self-organizing agent community systems by a formal qualitative approach and a quantitative experimental approach. The qualitative formal study by applying formal specification in SLABS and Scenario Calculus has proven that mature and optimal communities always form and become stable when agents behave based on the collective knowledge of the communities, whereas community formation does not always reach maturity and optimality if agents behave solely based on individual knowledge, and the communities are not always stable even if such a formation is achieved. The quantitative experimental study by simulation has shown that the convergence time of agent communities depends on several parameters of the system in certain complicated patterns, including the number of agents, the number of community organizers, the number of knowledge categories, and the size of the knowledge in each category

Macroporous materials: microfluidic fabrication, functionalization and applications

This article provides an up-to-date highly comprehensive overview (594 references) on the state of the art of the synthesis and design of macroporous materials using microfluidics and their applications in different fields

Intimate Partner Violence in Immigrant/Refugee Populations

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is the most common type of violence affecting women. Globally, Central Africa and South Asia have some of the highest rates of IPV. In Vermont, the majority of refugees are from these regions. Individual, interpersonal, and especially cultural values play critical roles in the definition/appraisal and decision to seek help in these women. This study examines ways to mitigate challenges that healthcare professionals have in identifying women who need help and barriers preventing these women from seeking help.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/fmclerk/1276/thumbnail.jp

Estimation and tests for power-transformed and threshold GARCH models

Consider a class of power transformed and threshold GARCH(p,q) (PTTGRACH(p,q)) model, which is a natural generalization of power-transformed and threshold GARCH(1,1) model in Hwang and Basawa (2004) and includes the standard GARCH model and many other models as special cases. We ¯rst establish the asymptotic normality for quasi-maximum likelihood estimators (QMLE) of the parameters under the condition that the error distribution has ¯nite fourth moment. For the case of heavy-tailed errors, we propose a least absolute deviations estimation (LADE) for PTTGARCH(p,q) model, and prove that the LADE is asymptotically normally distributed under very weak moment conditions. This paves the way for a statistical inference based on asymptotic normality for heavy-tailed PTTGARCH(p,q) models. As a consequence, we can construct the Wald test for GARCH structure and discuss the order selection problem in heavy-tailed cases. Numerical results show that LADE is more accurate than QMLE for heavy tailed errors. Furthermore the theory is applied to the daily returns of the Hong Kong Hang Seng Index, which suggests that asymmetry and nonlinearity could be present in the ¯nancial time series and the PTTGARCH model is capable of capturing these characteristics. As for the probabilistic structure of PTTGARCH(p,q), we give in the appendix a necessary and su±cient condition for the existence of a strictly stationary solution of the model, the existence of the moments and the tail behavior of the strictly stationary solution