Some distance bounds of branching processes and their diffusion limits

We compute exact values respectively bounds of "distances" - in the sense of (transforms of) power divergences and relative entropy - between two discrete-time Galton-Watson branching processes with immigration GWI for which the offspring as well as the immigration is arbitrarily Poisson-distributed (leading to arbitrary type of criticality). Implications for asymptotic distinguishability behaviour in terms of contiguity and entire separation of the involved GWI are given, too. Furthermore, we determine the corresponding limit quantities for the context in which the two GWI converge to Feller-type branching diffusion processes, as the time-lags between observations tend to zero. Some applications to (static random environment like) Bayesian decision making and Neyman-Pearson testing are presented as well.Comment: 45 page

Robust Procedures for Estimating and Testing in the Framework of Divergence Measures

The scope of the contributions to this book will be to present new and original research papers based on MPHIE, MHD, and MDPDE, as well as test statistics based on these estimators from a theoretical and applied point of view in different statistical problems with special emphasis on robustness. Manuscripts given solutions to different statistical problems as model selection criteria based on divergence measures or in statistics for high-dimensional data with divergence measures as loss function are considered. Reviews making emphasis in the most recent state-of-the art in relation to the solution of statistical problems base on divergence measures are also presented

CLADAG 2021 BOOK OF ABSTRACTS AND SHORT PAPERS

The book collects the short papers presented at the 13th Scientific Meeting of the Classification and Data Analysis Group (CLADAG) of the Italian Statistical Society (SIS). The meeting has been organized by the Department of Statistics, Computer Science and Applications of the University of Florence, under the auspices of the Italian Statistical Society and the International Federation of Classification Societies (IFCS). CLADAG is a member of the IFCS, a federation of national, regional, and linguistically-based classification societies. It is a non-profit, non-political scientific organization, whose aims are to further classification research

Change-point Problem and Regression: An Annotated Bibliography

The problems of identifying changes at unknown times and of estimating the location of changes in stochastic processes are referred to as the change-point problem or, in the Eastern literature, as disorder . The change-point problem, first introduced in the quality control context, has since developed into a fundamental problem in the areas of statistical control theory, stationarity of a stochastic process, estimation of the current position of a time series, testing and estimation of change in the patterns of a regression model, and most recently in the comparison and matching of DNA sequences in microarray data analysis. Numerous methodological approaches have been implemented in examining change-point models. Maximum-likelihood estimation, Bayesian estimation, isotonic regression, piecewise regression, quasi-likelihood and non-parametric regression are among the methods which have been applied to resolving challenges in change-point problems. Grid-searching approaches have also been used to examine the change-point problem. Statistical analysis of change-point problems depends on the method of data collection. If the data collection is ongoing until some random time, then the appropriate statistical procedure is called sequential. If, however, a large finite set of data is collected with the purpose of determining if at least one change-point occurred, then this may be referred to as non-sequential. Not surprisingly, both the former and the latter have a rich literature with much of the earlier work focusing on sequential methods inspired by applications in quality control for industrial processes. In the regression literature, the change-point model is also referred to as two- or multiple-phase regression, switching regression, segmented regression, two-stage least squares (Shaban, 1980), or broken-line regression. The area of the change-point problem has been the subject of intensive research in the past half-century. The subject has evolved considerably and found applications in many different areas. It seems rather impossible to summarize all of the research carried out over the past 50 years on the change-point problem. We have therefore confined ourselves to those articles on change-point problems which pertain to regression. The important branch of sequential procedures in change-point problems has been left out entirely. We refer the readers to the seminal review papers by Lai (1995, 2001). The so called structural change models, which occupy a considerable portion of the research in the area of change-point, particularly among econometricians, have not been fully considered. We refer the reader to Perron (2005) for an updated review in this area. Articles on change-point in time series are considered only if the methodologies presented in the paper pertain to regression analysis

Untangling hotel industry’s inefficiency: An SFA approach applied to a renowned Portuguese hotel chain

The present paper explores the technical efficiency of four hotels from Teixeira Duarte Group - a renowned Portuguese hotel chain. An efficiency ranking is established from these four hotel units located in Portugal using Stochastic Frontier Analysis. This methodology allows to discriminate between measurement error and systematic inefficiencies in the estimation process enabling to investigate the main inefficiency causes. Several suggestions concerning efficiency improvement are undertaken for each hotel studied.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Statistical inference and computation in elliptic PDE models

Partial differential equations (PDE) are ubiquitous in describing real-world phenomena. In many statistical models, PDE are used to encode complex relationships between unknown quantities and the observed data. We investigate statistical and computational questions arising in such models, adopting an infinite-dimensional `nonparametric' framework and assuming the observed data are subject to random noise. The main PDE examples are of elliptic or parabolic type. Chapter 2 investigates the problem of sampling from high-dimensional Bayesian posterior distributions. The main results consist of non-asymptotic computational guarantees for Langevin-type Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithms which scale polynomially in key quantities such as the dimension of the model, the desired precision level, and the number of available statistical measurements. The bounds hold with high probability under the distribution of the data, assuming that certain `local geometric' assumptions are fulfilled and that a good initialiser of the algorithm is available. We study a representative non-linear PDE example where the unknown is a coefficient function in a steady-state Schr\"odinger equation, and the solution to a corresponding boundary value problem is observed. Chapter 3 studies statistical convergence rates for nonparametric Tikhonov-type estimators, which can be interpreted also as Bayesian maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimators arising from certain Gaussian process priors. The theory is derived in a general setting for non-linear inverse problems and then applied to two examples, the steady-state Schr\"odinger equation studied in Chapter \ref{sampling} and a model for the steady-state heat equation. It is shown that the rates obtained are minimax-optimal in prediction loss. The final Chapter 4 considers a model for scalar diffusion processes $(X_t:t\geq 0)$ with an unknown drift function which is modelled nonparametrically. It is shown that in the low frequency sampling case, when the sample consists of $(X_0,X_\Delta,...,X_{n\Delta})$ for some fixed sampling distance $\Delta>0$, under mild regularity assumptions, the model satisfies the local asymptotic normality (LAN) property. The key tools used are regularity estimates and spectral properties for certain parabolic and elliptic PDE related to $(X_t:t\geq 0)$