Objective Bayesian Analysis of an Exponential Regression Model with Constrained Parameters Applied to Animal Digestibility

In animal digestibility the proportion of degraded food along the time has usually been modeled as a normal random variable with mean a function of the time and the following three parameters: the proportion of degraded food almost instantaneously, remaining proportion of food to be degraded, and velocity of degradation. The estimation of these parameters has been carried out mainly from a frequentist viewpoint by using the asymptotic distribution of the maximum likelihood estimator. This may give inadmissible estimates, such as values outside of the range of the parameters. This drawback could not appear if a Bayesian approach were adopted. In this article an objective Bayesian analysis is developed and illustrated on real and simulated data.     

A Note on the Upper Bound to Variance of the Sample Extreme from a Finite Population

We construct a new upper bound for the variance of the sample minimum and maximum in the case of a simple random sample drawn without replacement. The bound is optimal in the form provided. Similar bounds are shown for the other order statistics.     

Estimating the number of factors to include in a high-dimensional multivariate bilinear model

We present two new statistics for estimating the number of factors underlying in a multivariate system. One of the two new methods, the original NUMFACT, has been used in high profile environmental studies. The two new methods are first explained from a geometrical viewpoint. We then present an algebraic development and asymptotic cutoff points. Next we present a simulation study that shows that for skewed data the new methods are typically superior to traditional methods and for normally distributed data the new methods are competitive to the best of the traditional methods. We finally show how the methods compare by using two environmental data sets.     

Sensitivity of normal-based triple sampling sequential point estimation to the normality assumption

This paper discusses the sensitivity of the sequential normal-based triple sampling procedure for estimating the population mean to departures from normality. We assume that the underlying population has finite absolute sixth moment and find that asymptotically the behavior of the estimator and of the sample size depend on the skewness and kurtosis of the underlying distribution when using a squared error loss function with linear sampling cost. These results enable the effects of non-normality easily to be assessed both qualitatively and quantitatively. We supplement our asymptotic results with a simulation experiment to study the performance of the estimator and the sample size in a range of conditions.     

Monitoring Variation in a Multivariate Process When the Dimension is Large Relative to the Sample Size

A control procedure is presented for monitoring changes in variation for a multivariate normal process in a Phase II operation where the subgroup size, m, is less than p, the number of variates. The methodology is based on a form of Wilk' statistic, which can be expressed as a function of the ratio of the determinants of two separate estimates of the covariance matrix. One estimate is based on the historical data set from Phase I and the other is based on an augmented data set including new data obtained in Phase II. The proposed statistic is shown to be distributed as the product of independent beta distributions that can be approximated using either a chi-square or F-distribution. An ARL study of the statistic is presented for a range of conditions for the population covariance matrix. Cases are considered where a p-variate process is being monitored using a sample of m observations per subgroup and m < p. Data from an industrial multivariate process is used to illustrate the proposed technique.     

Sample moments of the autocorrelations of moving average processes and a modification to bartlett'sasymptotic variance formula

In this paper we express the sample autocorrelations for a moving average process of order q as a function of its own theoretical autocorrelations and the sample autocorrelations for the generating white noise series. Approximate analytic expressions are then obtained forthe moments of the sample autocorrelations of the moving average process.

Using these expressions, together with numerical evidence, we show that Bartlett's asymptotic formula for the variance of the sample autocorrelations of moving average processes, which is used widely in identifying these processes, is a large overestimate when considering finitesample sizes.

Our approach is for motivational purposes and so is purely formal, the amount of mathematics presented being kept to a minimum.