10,906 research outputs found
Tank construction for space vehicles Patent
Liquid propellant tank design with semitoroidal bulkhea
Model Choice and Diagnostics for Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using Statistics on Street Corners
The complexity of linear mixed-effects (LME) models means that traditional
diagnostics are rendered less effective. This is due to a breakdown of
asymptotic results, boundary issues, and visible patterns in residual plots
that are introduced by the model fitting process. Some of these issues are well
known and adjustments have been proposed. Working with LME models typically
requires that the analyst keeps track of all the special circumstances that may
arise. In this paper we illustrate a simpler but generally applicable approach
to diagnosing LME models. We explain how to use new visual inference methods
for these purposes. The approach provides a unified framework for diagnosing
LME fits and for model selection. We illustrate the use of this approach on
several commonly available data sets. A large-scale Amazon Turk study was used
to validate the methods. R code is provided for the analyses.Comment: 52 pages, 15 figures, 3 table
Market power of German food and beverage industries on international markets
In this paper the existence and magnitude of market power for German beer, cocoa powder, chocolate, and sugar confectionary exporters are tested. Two theoretical approaches are employed, the 'pricing of market' (PTM) and the 'residual demand elasticity' (RDE) approach. Even though all markets show a significant violation of the 'law of one price' estimations for monthly data from 1991 to 1998 reveal that markets are in most cases perfectly competitive. However, while in some cases significant market power is indicated for the PTM approach, the RDE results do not support these findings. This leads to the conclusion that the underlying theoretical models fail to consistently match the observed price equilibria on the market under study. --
Market Power of the German Beer Industry on Export Markets - An Empirical Study -
In this paper the existence and magnitude of market power for the German beer exporters is tested. Two theoretical approaches to model incomplete competition on international markets are employed, the ?pricing to market? (PTM) model the ?residual demand elasticity? (RDE) approach. Estimations for both models over the period from 1991 to 1998 reveal incompatible results regarding the underlying theoretical models and with respect to the approach that is used. While significant market power is indicated in the PTM model, the RDE approach signalizes perfect competition. This leads to the conclusion that the underlying theoretical models have to be extended to consistently match the observed market solutions in this case. --
Aesthetic-Driven Image Enhancement by Adversarial Learning
We introduce EnhanceGAN, an adversarial learning based model that performs
automatic image enhancement. Traditional image enhancement frameworks typically
involve training models in a fully-supervised manner, which require expensive
annotations in the form of aligned image pairs. In contrast to these
approaches, our proposed EnhanceGAN only requires weak supervision (binary
labels on image aesthetic quality) and is able to learn enhancement operators
for the task of aesthetic-based image enhancement. In particular, we show the
effectiveness of a piecewise color enhancement module trained with weak
supervision, and extend the proposed EnhanceGAN framework to learning a deep
filtering-based aesthetic enhancer. The full differentiability of our image
enhancement operators enables the training of EnhanceGAN in an end-to-end
manner. We further demonstrate the capability of EnhanceGAN in learning
aesthetic-based image cropping without any groundtruth cropping pairs. Our
weakly-supervised EnhanceGAN reports competitive quantitative results on
aesthetic-based color enhancement as well as automatic image cropping, and a
user study confirms that our image enhancement results are on par with or even
preferred over professional enhancement
A Flexible Modeling Approach for Robust Multi-Lane Road Estimation
A robust estimation of road course and traffic lanes is an essential part of
environment perception for next generations of Advanced Driver Assistance
Systems and development of self-driving vehicles. In this paper, a flexible
method for modeling multiple lanes in a vehicle in real time is presented.
Information about traffic lanes, derived by cameras and other environmental
sensors, that is represented as features, serves as input for an iterative
expectation-maximization method to estimate a lane model. The generic and
modular concept of the approach allows to freely choose the mathematical
functions for the geometrical description of lanes. In addition to the current
measurement data, the previously estimated result as well as additional
constraints to reflect parallelism and continuity of traffic lanes, are
considered in the optimization process. As evaluation of the lane estimation
method, its performance is showcased using cubic splines for the geometric
representation of lanes in simulated scenarios and measurements recorded using
a development vehicle. In a comparison to ground truth data, robustness and
precision of the lanes estimated up to a distance of 120 m are demonstrated. As
a part of the environmental modeling, the presented method can be utilized for
longitudinal and lateral control of autonomous vehicles
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