Developing “A Framework for Planning U.S. Federal Statistics, 1978–1989”

The Statistical Policy Division of the Office of Management and Budget has the overall responsibility for the planning and coordination of U.S. government statistics. The present staff of the Statistical Policy Division is attempting, through an integrated publication entitled “A Framework for Planning U.S. Federal Statistics, 1978–1989,” to state its perspective on necessary developments in the coming years. This article illustrates the character of the Framework materials and outlines the process for public review and comment on this undertaking.     

Statistical and quality control standards in the U.S

The U.S. standards system is a system of voluntary consensus standards in the private sector. There are more than 750 orgainzations in the U.S. that issue standards. Two very important standards orgainzations are ASTM Committee E-11 on Statistical Methods and ANSI Committee Z-1 on Quality Assurance develop statistical standards, and standards under the jurisdiction of these committees are listed. The most widely-used statistical standards are the standard tables for sampling inspection, which were developed by the U. S. militart, and have been adopted, modifed or revised to appear in various standard systems, both military and civilian, national and international     

Accent on Teaching Materials

Review of International Association for Statistical Education Proceedings: Proceedings of the First Scientific Meeting of the International Association for Statistical Education, Lina Brunelli and Guiseppe Cicchitelli, Editors. U.S. $5 (cost of postage) from International Statistical Institute, 428 Prinses Beatrixlann, 2270 AZ Voorburg, The Netherlands. Includes 49 papers presented in Perugia, Italy, in August 1993; 476 pages. Reviewed by Peter Holmes     

Integrated statistical and decision models for multi-stage health care audit sampling

Health care audits are crucial in managing the government insurance programs that are estimated to have losses amounting to billions of dollars every year. Statistical methods such as sampling have long been used to handle their size and complexity. Sampling from health care claims data can benefit from multi-stage approaches, especially when the evaluation of the tradeoffs between precision and cost is important. The use of decision models could facilitate health care auditors and policy makers make the best use of these sampling outputs. This paper proposes an integrated multi-stage sampling and decision-making framework that enables auditors address the tradeoffs between audit costs and expected overpayment recovery. We illustrate the framework and discuss insights utilizing a variety of overpayment scenarios for payment populations including U.S. Medicare Part B claims payment data.     

Comment on “Issues Involved With the Seasonal Adjustment of Economic Time Series” by William R. Bell and Steven C. Hiilmer

This article investigates the existence of multiple regimes in the U.S. economy during the 1923—1991 period. A technique known as regression tree analysis is applied to search for splits in the data, if any exist, rather than choosing a splitting point a priori as has been done in previous work. Using this technique, strong evidence for the existence of nonlinear behavior of U.S. output is found over this period. Monte Carlo results are presented to assess the significance of the regime changes that are found.     

Editor's Notes

Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Teaching Statistics Editor David Vere-Jones; assistants: Shelley Carlyle and Brian P. Dawkins. Published by the International Statistical Institute. Available from ISI Permanent Office, 428 Prinses Beatrixlaan, P.O. Box 950, 2270 AZ Voor-burg, The Netherlands. $38 (U.S.), including postage and handling. Reviewed by Elliot A. Tanis     

模糊数据均值方法及应用研究

提出一种＂Zadeh＂式模糊数据,并探讨这种模糊数据的模糊样本均值及其统计检验问题,给出模糊等于、模糊属于的定义,提出离散型和连续型模糊总体均值检验方法,并利用一些实例阐述了此类统计方法的应用。     

A Theory for Coloring Bivariate Statistical Maps

Consideration of some practical uses of statistical bivariate maps—for example, display of association between variables—leads to principles for making effective use of color to represent data values. Effective color schemes for bivariate maps are viewed as continuous transformations from color models to the unit square with appropriate restrictions involving hue, saturation, and brightness. Several schemes, including those used by the U.S. Census Bureau, are criticized on the basis of this theory.     

News

United Nations Statistical Commission recommends program—Bureaus of Business Research, Venezuelan and public opinion statisticians form new societies—Institute of Numerical Analysis established—New publications     

Beyond Google: Bibliographic Transformation to Connect Users to Good Content

ABSTRACT

At the 2017 North Carolina Serials Conference, keynote speaker Regina Romano Reynolds—Director, U.S. ISSN Center and Head, ISSN Section at the Library of Congress—explored how bibliographic transformation can connect users to good-quality content. Offering examples of current and potential serials management projects, Reynolds shared her vision for breaking down information silos, experimenting in the resource management space, and the need for visionary leadership.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed:
R.J. Adler, R.E. Feldman & M.S. Taqqu, A Practical Guide to Heavy Tails: Statistical Techniques and Applications.
J.J. Foste, A Beginner's Guide to Data Analysis Using SPSS for Windows.
N. Limnios and G. Oprisan, Semi–Markov Processes and Reliability.     

Acknowledgment of the Editorial Assistants,Book Review Editors,and Associate Editors

Since the extensive work by Burns and Mitchell, many economists have interpreted economic fluctuations in terms of business-cycle phases. Given this, we argue that, in addition to usual model-selection criteria currently used in the profession, the adequacy of a univariate macroeconomic time series model should be based on its ability to replicate two important business-cycle features of the U.S. data—duration and amplitude. We propose several checks for whether univariate statistical models generate business-cycle features observed in U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) and find that many popular nonlinear models for the log of real GDP are no better at replicating the duration and amplitude features of the data than a simple ARIMA(1, 1, 0).     

Reviews

Andersen, P. K., Borgan, O., Gill, R. D. and Keiding, N. Statistical Models based on Counting Processes
Anderson, T. W. and Finn, J. D. The New Statistical Analysis of Data
Azzalini, A. Statistical Inference—based on the Likelihood
Borodin, A. N. and Salminen, P. Handbook of Brownian Motion—Facts and Formulae
Brockwell, P. J. and Davis, R. A. Introduction to Time Series and Forecasting
Chapman, M. and Wykes, C. Plain Figures
Clarke, G. M. and Kempson, R. E. Introduction to the Design and Analysis of Experiments
Goldstein, H. and Lewis, T. (eds) Assessment: Problems, Developments and Statistical Issues; a Volume of Expert Contributions
Grenander, U. Elements of Pattern Theory
Högnäs, G. and Mukherjea, A. Probability Measures on Semigroups
Levitas, R. and Guy, W. Interpreting Official Statistics
van der Linden, W. J. and Hambleton, R. K. (eds) Handbook of Modern Item Response Theory
Ross, S. M. Simulation
Simonnet, M. Measures and Probabilities
Small, C. G. The Statistical Theory of Shape
van der Vaart, A. and Wellner, J. A. Weak Convergence and Empirical Processes with Applications to Statistics     

BOOK REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article:
Incomplete Block Designs. By Peter W. M. John.
Statistical Modeling Techniques. By Samuel S. Shapiro and Alan J. Gross
Factorial Designs. By B. L. Raktoe, A. Hedayat and W. T. Federer.
Stochastic Storage Processes—Queues, Insurance Risk and Dams. By N. U. Prabhu.
A User's Guide to the Gottman-Williams Time Series Analysis Computer Programs for Social Scientists. By Esther A. Williams and John M. Gottman.
Statistics at Work. Edited by S. Gubbins, D. A. Rhoades, D. Vere-Jones.
Computing in Statistical Science through APL. By Francis John Anscombe.     

U.S. Institutional Representation on Editorial Boards of U.S. Statistics Journals

This article presents two different, but similar, rankings of U.S. statistics faculties according to their current representation on editorial boards of 14 U.S. statistics journals. The data show that there is a widespread balance of individuals, institutions, and geographical locations in the U.S. with respect to publication officers.     

Forecasting Accuracy of Alternative Techniques: A Comparison of U.S. Macroeconomic Forecasts

This article introduces and discusses a new measure of the relative economic affluence (REA) between income distributions with different means. The REA measure D is applied to the U.S. white and black household income distributions of 1967 and 1979. The measure D shows that the REA of the white households with respect to the black households decreased from 1967 to 1979. This conclusion contrasts with those obtained by applications of distance or quasi-distance functions. It is shown in this study that REA measures and distance functions address different and relevant issues. An REA measure deals with the relation “more affluent than” and defines a partial strict ordering over the set of pairs of income distributions—that is, the relation is asymmetric and transitive—whereas a distance function accounts for the dissimilarity between distributions without imposing an ordering relation and hence fulfills the symmetry property.     

Testing Business Cycle Asymmetries Based on Autoregressions With a Markov-Switching Intercept

Implications of two concepts of asymmetry—deepness and steepness—are investigated for autoregressive processes with a Markov-switching intercept. The formulas for the skewness of these processes and the skewness of the first differences of these processes are derived. The parameter restrictions leading to nondeepness and nonsteepness are presented for the special case of a first-order autoregression and two states. It is shown that these restrictions imply that previous tests for asymmetries in autoregressive processes with a Markov-switching intercept can lead to wrong conclusions. In an empirical application of the developed tests, the U.S. unemployment rate is found to be steep.     

Simultaneous edit-imputation and disclosure limitation for business establishment data

Business establishment microdata typically are required to satisfy agency-specified edit rules, such as balance equations and linear inequalities. Inevitably some establishments' reported data violate the edit rules. Statistical agencies correct faulty values using a process known as edit-imputation. Business establishment data also must be heavily redacted before being shared with the public; indeed, confidentiality concerns lead many agencies not to share establishment microdata as unrestricted access files. When microdata must be heavily redacted, one approach is to create synthetic data, as done in the U.S. Longitudinal Business Database and the German IAB Establishment Panel. This article presents the first implementation of a fully integrated approach to edit-imputation and data synthesis. We illustrate the approach on data from the U.S. Census of Manufactures and present a variety of evaluations of the utility of the synthetic data. The paper also presents assessments of disclosure risks for several intruder attacks. We find that the synthetic data preserve important distributional features from the post-editing confidential microdata, and have low risks for the various attacks.     

An Analysis of the Game of Tennis

The American Statistical Association conducted a pilot study to develop methodology to conduct a nationwide evaluation of survey practices and the quality of survey data. This article is a report on the objectives and principal findings of that pilot study. In addition, the objectives of the nationwide study are presented.     

Oil and gas depletion: Diffusion models and forecasting under strategic intervention

Crude oil and natural gas depletion may be modelled by a diffusion process based upon a constrained life-cycle. Here we consider the Generalized Bass Model. The choice is motivated by the realistic assumption that there is a self-evident link between oil and gas extraction and the spreading of the modern technologies in wide areas such as transport, heating, cooling, chemistry and hydrocarbon fuels consumption. Such a model may include deterministic or semi-deterministic regulatory interventions. Statistical analysis is based upon nonlinear methodologies and more flexible autoregressive structure of residuals. The technical aim of this paper is to outline the meaningful hierarchy existing among the components of such diffusion models. Statistical effort in residual component analysis may be read as a significant confirmation of a well-founded diffusion process under rare but strong deterministic shocks. Applications of such ideas are proposed with reference to world oil and gas production data and to particular regions such as mainland U.S.A., U.K., Norway and Alaska. The main results give new evidence in time-peaks location and in residual times to depletion.