Basic concepts in social sciences II

In this paper an extension is given of the set of concepts considered to be basic to the fields of Economics, Organization Theory, Political Science, Psychology and Sociology. The modeling is in terms of automata and automata networks. In the first paper on basic concepts the simplest unit, the social atom, stood central. In this second paper social structures and processes are focused upon

Modeling inequality and spread in multiple regression

We consider concepts and models for measuring inequality in the distribution of resources with a focus on how inequality varies as a function of covariates. Lorenz introduced a device for measuring inequality in the distribution of income that indicates how much the incomes below the u$^{th}$ quantile fall short of the egalitarian situation where everyone has the same income. Gini introduced a summary measure of inequality that is the average over u of the difference between the Lorenz curve and its values in the egalitarian case. More generally, measures of inequality are useful for other response variables in addition to income, e.g. wealth, sales, dividends, taxes, market share and test scores. In this paper we show that a generalized van Zwet type dispersion ordering for distributions of positive random variables induces an ordering on the Lorenz curve, the Gini coefficient and other measures of inequality. We use this result and distributional orderings based on transformations of distributions to motivate parametric and semiparametric models whose regression coefficients measure effects of covariates on inequality. In particular, we extend a parametric Pareto regression model to a flexible semiparametric regression model and give partial likelihood estimates of the regression coefficients and a baseline distribution that can be used to construct estimates of the various conditional measures of inequality.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/074921706000000428 in the IMS Lecture Notes--Monograph Series (http://www.imstat.org/publications/lecnotes.htm) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Classification of meetings and their participants

On the basis of a coding of utterances we investigate ways to classify participants of a meeting. On the basis of a coding of states of a meeting activities during meetings are classified

Basic concepts in social sciences III

In this paper the set of concepts considered to be basic to the fields of Economics, Organization Theory, Political Science, Psychology and Sociology is completed. The set of 55 basic concepts in the first two papers on basic concepts was mainly determined by considering concepts in relation to social atoms. The concepts that play a role in n-networks form the majority of the concepts added in this paper

Parameter Estimation of Social Forces in Crowd Dynamics Models via a Probabilistic Method

Focusing on a specific crowd dynamics situation, including real life experiments and measurements, our paper targets a twofold aim: (1) we present a Bayesian probabilistic method to estimate the value and the uncertainty (in the form of a probability density function) of parameters in crowd dynamic models from the experimental data; and (2) we introduce a fitness measure for the models to classify a couple of model structures (forces) according to their fitness to the experimental data, preparing the stage for a more general model-selection and validation strategy inspired by probabilistic data analysis. Finally, we review the essential aspects of our experimental setup and measurement technique.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figure

Autopoietic Theory as a Framework for Biometrics

Autopoietic theory which represents a framework for describing complex non-linear and especially living systems is described in a context of biometric characteristics. It is argued that any living system by performing an internal process of reproducing its structural components yields physical biometric characteristics. Likewise any living system when structurally coupling to another (eventually allopoietic) system yields a behavioral or psychological characteristic of the living system. It is shown that any system that can be considered as autopoietic can potentially be measured, authenticated and/or identified using adequate biometric methods, and thus biometrics is applicable to any autopoietic system: living beings, groups of living beings, social systems, organizations as well as information systems. In the end implications of such a conceptualization are discussed as well as possible applications

A MPCC-NLP approach for an electric power market problem

The electric power market is changing - it has passed from a regulated market, where the government of each country had the control of prices, to a deregulated market economy. Each company competes in order to get more clients and maximize its profits. This market is represented by a Stackelberg game with two firms, leader and follower, and the leader anticipates the reaction of the follower. The problem is formulated as a Mathematical Program with Complementarity Constraints (MPCC). It is shown that the constraint qualifications usually assumed to prove convergence of standard algorithms fail to hold for MPCC. To circumvent this, a reformulation for a nonlinear problem (NLP) is proposed. Numerical tests using the NEOS server platform are presented