Quantifying uncertainty in the biospheric carbon flux for England and Wales

Summary.  A crucial issue in the current global warming debate is the effect of vegetation and soils on carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentrations in the atmosphere. Vegetation can extract CO₂ through photosynthesis, but respiration, decay of soil organic matter and disturbance effects such as fire return it to the atmosphere. The balance of these processes is the net carbon flux. To estimate the biospheric carbon flux for England and Wales, we address the statistical problem of inference for the sum of multiple outputs from a complex deterministic computer code whose input parameters are uncertain. The code is a process model which simulates the carbon dynamics of vegetation and soils, including the amount of carbon that is stored as a result of photosynthesis and the amount that is returned to the atmosphere through respiration. The aggregation of outputs corresponding to multiple sites and types of vegetation in a region gives an estimate of the total carbon flux for that region over a period of time. Expert prior opinions are elicited for marginal uncertainty about the relevant input parameters and for correlations of inputs between sites. A Gaussian process model is used to build emulators of the multiple code outputs and Bayesian uncertainty analysis is then used to propagate uncertainty in the input parameters through to uncertainty on the aggregated output. Numerical results are presented for England and Wales in the year 2000. It is estimated that vegetation and soils in England and Wales constituted a net sink of 7.55 Mt C (1 Mt C = 10¹² g of carbon) in 2000, with standard deviation 0.56 Mt C resulting from the sources of uncertainty that are considered.     

改进灰色预测在油田多目标规划决策中的应用

建立了S油田勘探、开发、炼化、机械、公用工程等多个部门和全局的非线性多级目标优化规划模型,应用关联分析、改进灰色预测、回归分析求取规划模型的约束方程并线性化;编制了相应的计算软件,使之快速预测和优化油田各部门“九五”各年的投资和产值;并将优化结果与油田过去或计划值加以对比,给油田规划决策带来一定的参考。     

Estimating household structure in ancient China by using historical data: a latent class analysis of partially missing patterns

Summary.  Social data often contain missing information. The problem is inevitably severe when analysing historical data. Conventionally, researchers analyse complete records only. Listwise deletion not only reduces the effective sample size but also may result in biased estimation, depending on the missingness mechanism. We analyse household types by using population registers from ancient China (618–907 AD) by comparing a simple classification, a latent class model of the complete data and a latent class model of the complete and partially missing data assuming four types of ignorable and non-ignorable missingness mechanisms. The findings show that either a frequency classification or a latent class analysis using the complete records only yielded biased estimates and incorrect conclusions in the presence of partially missing data of a non-ignorable mechanism. Although simply assuming ignorable or non-ignorable missing data produced consistently similarly higher estimates of the proportion of complex households, a specification of the relationship between the latent variable and the degree of missingness by a row effect uniform association model helped to capture the missingness mechanism better and improved the model fit.     

Bayesian networks for imputation

Summary.  Bayesian networks are particularly useful for dealing with high dimensional statistical problems. They allow a reduction in the complexity of the phenomenon under study by representing joint relationships between a set of variables through conditional relationships between subsets of these variables. Following Thibaudeau and Winkler we use Bayesian networks for imputing missing values. This method is introduced to deal with the problem of the consistency of imputed values: preservation of statistical relationships between variables ( statistical consistency ) and preservation of logical constraints in data ( logical consistency ). We perform some experiments on a subset of anonymous individual records from the 1991 UK population census.     

Estimator Choice and Fisher's Paradox: A Monte Carlo Study

This paper argues that Fisher's paradox can be explained away in terms of estimator choice. We analyse by means of Monte Carlo experiments the small sample properties of a large set of estimators (including virtually all available single-equation estimators), and compute the critical values based on the empirical distributions of the t-statistics, for a variety of Data Generation Processes (DGPs), allowing for structural breaks, ARCH effects etc. We show that precisely the estimators most commonly used in the literature, namely OLS, Dynamic OLS (DOLS) and non-prewhitened FMLS, have the worst performance in small samples, and produce rejections of the Fisher hypothesis. If one employs the estimators with the most desirable properties (i.e., the smallest downward bias and the minimum shift in the distribution of the associated t-statistics), or if one uses the empirical critical values, the evidence based on US data is strongly supportive of the Fisher relation, consistently with many theoretical models.     

具体应用中的矛盾分析法之种种

矛盾分析法在科学认识中的具体应用,可作多侧面的展开,形成多方面的更为具体的科学方法。这些具体科学方法可概括为,矛盾的定性分析法、矛盾的定位分析法、矛盾的定点分析法、矛盾的定量分析法、矛盾的定势分析法、矛盾的历史过程分析法、矛盾的逻辑过程分析法、矛盾的系统分析法、矛盾的对立面互补分析法等等.它们均体现哲学方法与具体科学方法的一致性。     

A study of simulated annealing and a revised cascade algorithm for image reconstruction

We describe an image reconstruction problem and the computational difficulties arising in determining the maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimate. Two algorithms for tackling the problem, iterated conditional modes (ICM) and simulated annealing, are usually applied pixel by pixel. The performance of this strategy can be poor, particularly for heavily degraded images, and as a potential improvement Jubb and Jennison (1991) suggest the cascade algorithm in which ICM is initially applied to coarser images formed by blocking squares of pixels. In this paper we attempt to resolve certain criticisms of cascade and present a version of the algorithm extended in definition and implementation. As an illustration we apply our new method to a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image. We also carry out a study of simulated annealing, with and without cascade, applied to a more tractable minimization problem from which we gain insight into the properties of cascade algorithms.     

光纤扭转对循环延迟线偏振控制系统特性影响的研究

借助模式耦合理论和矩阵光学的知识,对引入光纤扭转机构后的延迟线偏振控制系统的偏振转换特性进行了分析,推导出了描述该系统偏振特性的琼斯矩阵,得到了光纤扭转对系统偏振特性影响的理论模型。     

分析Chiral分层媒质特性的一般方法(英文)

提出了一套系统方法用于求解任意导体片位于界面的Chiral分层媒质的谐振频率,衰减因子和电磁场分布。文中的分析是在Fourier变换域的并矢格林函数和矩阵分析的基础上来进行的,给出的公式的最大价值在于它提供了求解Chiral分层媒质问题的方法论。     

蜕变与再生——菲律宾洪水神话的宏观结构

菲律宾洪水神话异文的具体情节不尽相同,但其隐含的基本叙事结构却是共同的,都可以划分为开端、中介、结尾三个发展阶段,于是可以用一个统一的情节结构纲目来归纳各异文中的情节发展。它们在宏观叙事结构上具有“蜕变型”的统一范式,意味着由旧秩序向新秩序的蜕变。