Interpolation methods for geographical data: Housing and commercial establishment markets

The estimation of commercial property prices in a touristic city can be explored through spatial interpolation methods, but in the presence of small sample sizes, auxiliary stochastic processes that are correlated with the prices of commercial establishments are needed. The aim of this paper is to compare the various estimates of commercial establishment prices in Toledo (Spain) provided by methods based on inverse distance weighting, 2-D shape functions for triangles, kriging and cokriging (the housing prices being the auxiliary stochastic process). The results indicate that kriging improves the classical interpolation methods and that cokriging has a clear advantage over kriging.

Building an Environmental Quality Index for a big city: a spatial interpolation approach with DP2

The elaboration of Environmental Quality Indexes (EQI) for big cities is one of the main topics in regional and environmental economics. One of the usual methodological paths consists of generating a single measure as a linear combination of several air contaminants applying Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Then, as a final step, a spatial interpolation is carried out to determine the level of contamination across the city in order to point out the so-called ‘hot points’. In this article, we propose an alternative approach to build an EQI introducing some methodological and practical novelties. From the point of view of the selection of the variables, first we will consider noise -joint to air pollution- as a relevant environmental variable. We also propose to add ‘subjective’ data -available at the census tracts level- to the group of ‘objective’ environmental variables, which are only available at a number of environmental monitoring stations. This combination leads to a mixed environmental index (MEQI), which is more complete and adequate in a socioeconomic context. From the point of view of the computation process, we use kriging to match the monitoring stations registers to the Census data. We follow an inverse process as usual, since it leads to better estimates. In a first step, we krige the environmental variables to the complete surface and finally, we elaborate the environmental index. At last, in order to build the final synthetic index, we do not use Principal Components Analysis -as it is usual in this kind of exercises- but a better one, the Pena Distance method (DP2).Environmental index, Air pollution, Noise, Subjecive expectations, Kriging, Distance indicators

On reproducing kernel methods in functional statistics

Tesis doctoral inédita leída en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Facultad de Ciencias, Departamento de Matématicas. Fecha de lectura: 30-11-201

Wage Concentration in Spain: A Spatial Analysis

In this article, the degree of concentration of wages in Spain at the provincial and regional levels is estimated using the latest available micro-data corresponding to the Structure of Earnings Survey 2010 (N = 216.769). From the analysis of the statistics obtained, it is possible to know in detail the spatial distribution of national wage inequality, to identify those areas where inequality is greatest, and to estimate the possible existence of spatial dependence and structure. The analysis focuses not only on the study of global inequality, but delves into the question by extending the analysis from a gender perspective

On functional logistic regression: some conceptual issues

The main ideas behind the classic multivariate logistic regression model make sense when translated to the functional setting, where the explanatory variable X is a function and the response Y is binary. However, some important technical issues appear (or are aggravated with respect to those of the multivariate case) due to the functional nature of the explanatory variable. First, the mere definition of the model can be questioned: While most approaches so far proposed rely on the L2-based model, we explore an alternative (in some sense, more general) approach, based on the theory of reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHS). The validity conditions of such RKHS-based model, and their relation with the L2-based one, are investigated and made explicit in two formal results. Some relevant particular cases are considered as well. Second, we show that, under very general conditions, the maximum likelihood of the logistic model parameters fails to exist in the functional case, although some restricted versions can be considered. Third, we check (in the framework of binary classification) the practical performance of some RKHS-based procedures, well-suited to our model: They are compared to several competing methods via Monte Carlo experiments and the analysis of real data setsThis work has been partially supported by Spanish Grant PID2019-109387GB-I0

Imagen social de la vejez: un acercamiento a los principales estereotipos y las repercusiones discriminatorias en las personas mayores

El trabajo de fin de grado se basa en un estudio exploratorio sobre la imagen social que se tiene de la vejez en la actualidad y las actitudes discriminatorias a las que puede conllevar dicha imagen. Para la realización de este estudio, se pretende recopilar información a nivel nacional e internacional sobre los conceptos marcados, y establecer una base empírica mediante el establecimiento dos cuestionarios a jóvenes, profesionales y mayores para conocer el grado de estereotipo hacia la vejez, y establecer comparaciones