Records in Athletics through Extreme-Value Theory

In this paper we shall be interested in two questions on extremes relating to world records in athletics.The first question is: what is the ultimate world record in a specific athletics event (such as the 100m for men or the high jump for women), given today's state of the art?Our second question is: how `good' is a current athletics world record?An answer to the second question will also enable us to compare the quality of world records in different athletics events. We shall consider these questions for each of twenty-eight events (fourteen for both men and women).We approach the two questions with the probability theory of extreme values and the corresponding statistical techniques.The statistical model is of nonparametric nature, but some `weak regularity' of the tail of the distribution function will be assumed.We will derive the limiting distribution of the estimated quality of a world record.While almost all attempts to predict an ultimate world record are based on the development of top performances over time, this will not be our method.Instead, we shall only use the top performances themselves.Our estimated ultimate world record tells us what, in principle, is possible now, given today's knowledge, material (shoes, suits, equipment), and drugs laws.Endpoint estimation;exceedance probability;ranking;statistics of extremes;world record

Ultimate 100m World Records Through Extreme-Value Theory

We use extreme-value theory to estimate the ultimate world records for the 100m running, for both men and women. For this aim we collected the fastest personal best times set between January 1991 and June 2008. Estimators of the extreme-value index are based on a certain number of upper order statistics. To optimize this number of order statistics we minimize the asymptotic mean squared error of the moment estimator. Using the thus obtained estimate for the extreme-value index, the right endpoint of the speed distribution is estimated. The corresponding time can be interpreted as the estimated ultimate world record: the best possible time that could be run in the near future. We find 9.51 seconds for the 100m men and 10.33 seconds for the women. Running title. Ultimate 100m world records.

Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department v. The Center for Investigative Reporting, Inc., a California Nonprofit Organization, 136 Nev. Adv. Opn. No. 15 (2020)

Pursuant to NRS 239.010, the Nevada Public Records Act (NPRA), governmental entities are required to make available to the public, nonconfidential public records that the governmental entity has in its legal custody or control. If a governmental entity denies a request for public records, the person requesting such records may seek a court order to compel production. NRS 239.011(1). If the party requesting such records prevails, that party is entitled to receive attorney fees and costs. NRS 239.011(2). This case asks whether the requesting party is entitled to receive attorney fees and costs when the parties reach an agreement that gives the requesting party access to the requested records before the court enters a judgment on the merits of the case. In response to this question, the Court adopts the catalyst theory, which provides that, “attorney fees may be awarded even when litigation does not result in a judicial resolution if the defendant changes its behavior substantially because of, and in the manner sought by, the litigation.” Accordingly, the Court affirms the district court’s decision that the Respondent, The Center for Investigative Reporting, Inc., is entitled to receive attorney fees and costs in a reasonable amount, pursuant to the NPRA under NRS 239.011(2)

A Bayesian Approach to Graphical Record Linkage and De-duplication

We propose an unsupervised approach for linking records across arbitrarily many files, while simultaneously detecting duplicate records within files. Our key innovation involves the representation of the pattern of links between records as a bipartite graph, in which records are directly linked to latent true individuals, and only indirectly linked to other records. This flexible representation of the linkage structure naturally allows us to estimate the attributes of the unique observable people in the population, calculate transitive linkage probabilities across records (and represent this visually), and propagate the uncertainty of record linkage into later analyses. Our method makes it particularly easy to integrate record linkage with post-processing procedures such as logistic regression, capture-recapture, etc. Our linkage structure lends itself to an efficient, linear-time, hybrid Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm, which overcomes many obstacles encountered by previously record linkage approaches, despite the high-dimensional parameter space. We illustrate our method using longitudinal data from the National Long Term Care Survey and with data from the Italian Survey on Household and Wealth, where we assess the accuracy of our method and show it to be better in terms of error rates and empirical scalability than other approaches in the literature.Comment: 39 pages, 8 figures, 8 tables. Longer version of arXiv:1403.0211, In press, Journal of the American Statistical Association: Theory and Methods (2015