88,106 research outputs found
Algorithms for randomness in the behavioral sciences: A tutorial
Simulations and experiments frequently demand the generation of random numbera that have
specific distributions. This article describes which distributions should be used for the most cammon
problems and gives algorithms to generate the numbers.It is also shown that a commonly used permutation algorithm (Nilsson, 1978) is deficient
ON THE RESAMPLING METHOD IN SAMPLE MEDIAN ESTIMATION
Bootstrap is one of the resampling statistical methods. This method was proposed by B. Efron. The main idea of bootstrap is to treat the original sample of values as a stand-in for the population and to resample with replacement from it repeatedly. Bootstrap allows estimation of the sampling distribution of almost any statistics using only very simple methods. This paper presents a modification of a resampling procedure based on bootstrap sampling. The proposal leads to sampling from population with density function f(x), where f(x) is estimated based on the kernel estimation. The properties of the method were analyzed in the median estimation in Monte Carlo study.The proposal could be useful for the parameters estimation in the case of a small sample. This method could be used in quality control procedures such as control charts or in the acceptance sampling
Power-law distributions in empirical data
Power-law distributions occur in many situations of scientific interest and
have significant consequences for our understanding of natural and man-made
phenomena. Unfortunately, the detection and characterization of power laws is
complicated by the large fluctuations that occur in the tail of the
distribution -- the part of the distribution representing large but rare events
-- and by the difficulty of identifying the range over which power-law behavior
holds. Commonly used methods for analyzing power-law data, such as
least-squares fitting, can produce substantially inaccurate estimates of
parameters for power-law distributions, and even in cases where such methods
return accurate answers they are still unsatisfactory because they give no
indication of whether the data obey a power law at all. Here we present a
principled statistical framework for discerning and quantifying power-law
behavior in empirical data. Our approach combines maximum-likelihood fitting
methods with goodness-of-fit tests based on the Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic
and likelihood ratios. We evaluate the effectiveness of the approach with tests
on synthetic data and give critical comparisons to previous approaches. We also
apply the proposed methods to twenty-four real-world data sets from a range of
different disciplines, each of which has been conjectured to follow a power-law
distribution. In some cases we find these conjectures to be consistent with the
data while in others the power law is ruled out.Comment: 43 pages, 11 figures, 7 tables, 4 appendices; code available at
http://www.santafe.edu/~aaronc/powerlaws
- …