A Dutch Book theorem for partial subjective probability

The aim of this paper is to show that partial probability can be justified from the standpoint of subjective probability in much the same way as classical probability does. The seminal works of Ramsey and De Finetti have furnished a method for assessing subjective probabilities: ask about the bets the decision-maker would be willing to place. So we introduce the concept of partial bet and partial Dutch Book and prove for partial probability a result similar to the Ramsey-De Finetti theorem. Finally, we make a comparison between two concepts of bet: we can bet our money on a sentence describing an event, or we can bet our money on the event itself, generally conceived as a set. These two ways of understanding a bet are equivalent in classical probability, but not in partial probability

Mortgaging the American Dream: The Misplaced Role of Accreditation in the Federal Student Loan System

In 2013, outstanding student loan balances in the United States exceeded $994 billion. This growing volume of student debt has had far–reaching consequences for both individual borrowers and society as a whole. In many ways, the federal student loan program, available to students under the Higher Education Act (HEA), has achieved its goal of making higher education more accessible. Undergraduate college enrollment increased from 10.5 million students in 1980 to 17.6 million students in 2009. Despite the benefit of increased enrollment, however, the federal loan program has been criticized for increasing student loan debt and contributing to the “student loan crisis.” This student loan crisis threatens to undermine the purpose of the HEA by making higher education less accessible to Americans. Higher education institutions must be accredited to be eligible for Title IV federal funding under the HEA. The federal government relies on accreditation to assess the academic quality of the institutions and programs to which it provides federal funding. This federal funding–accreditation relationship, riddled with conflicts of interest, has been ineffective in regulating student loans, contributing to the mounting student loan debt. This Note examines the relationship between the federal student loan system and accrediting bodies through economic theory, ultimately arguing that the HEA be amended to decouple accreditation and federal student loans

A MATLAB SMO implementation to train a SVM classifier: Application to multi-style license plate numbers recognition

This paper implements the Support Vector Machine (SVM) training procedure proposed by John Platt denominated Sequential Minimimal Optimization (SMO). The application of this system involves a multi-style license plate characters recognition identifying numbers from “0” to “9”. In order to be robust against license plates with different character/background colors, the characters (numbers) visual information is encoded using Histograms of Oriented Gradients (HOG). A reliability measure to validate the system outputs is also proposed. Several tests are performed to evaluate the sensitivity of the algorithm to different parameters and kernel functions.Fil: Negri, Pablo Augusto. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Investigación En Ciencias de la Computación. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Investigación En Ciencias de la Computacion; Argentin

On Goodness-of-fit Testing for Ergodic Diffusion Process with Shift Parameter

A problem of goodness-of-fit test for ergodic diffusion processes is presented. In the null hypothesis the drift of the diffusion is supposed to be in a parametric form with unknown shift parameter. Two Cramer-Von Mises type test statistics are studied. The first one is based on local time estimator of the invariant density, the second one is based on the empirical distribution function. The unknown parameter is estimated via the maximum likelihood estimator. It is shown that both the limit distributions of the two test statistics do not depend on the unknown parameter, so the distributions of the tests are asymptotically parameter free. Some considerations on the consistency of the proposed tests and some simulation studies are also given

A constructive proof of the Heine-Borel covering theorem for formal reals

The continuum is here presented as a formal space by means of a finitary inductive definition. In this setting a constructive proof of the Heine-Borel covering theorem is given