Relatioinships between economic and statistical price indices

In the following, the economic counterparts of Eichhorn's and Voeller's tests for statistical price indices will be studied. We will see that replacing the statistical Commensurability Axiom in the economic price index theory by a property which is only concerned with price changes leads to similar relationships between this one and several other tests as in the statistical price index theory.     

Some maximum-indifference estimators for the slope of a univariate linear model

As known, the least-squares estimator of the slope of a univariate linear model sets to zero the covariance between the regression residuals and the values of the explanatory variable. To prevent the estimation process from being influenced by outliers, which can be theoretically modelled by a heavy-tailed distribution for the error term, one can substitute covariance with some robust measures of association, for example Kendall's tau in the popular Theil–Sen estimator. In a scarcely known Italian paper, Cifarelli [(1978), ‘La Stima del Coefficiente di Regressione Mediante l'Indice di Cograduazione di Gini’, Rivista di matematica per le scienze economiche e sociali, 1, 7–38. A translation into English is available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1411.4809 and will appear in Decisions in Economics and Finance] shows that a gain of efficiency can be obtained by using Gini's cograduation index instead of Kendall's tau. This paper introduces a new estimator, derived from another association measure recently proposed. Such a measure is strongly related to Gini's cograduation index, as they are both built to vanish in the general framework of indifference. The newly proposed estimator is shown to be unbiased and asymptotically normally distributed. Moreover, all considered estimators are compared via their asymptotic relative efficiency and a small simulation study. Finally, some indications about the performance of the considered estimators in the presence of contaminated normal data are provided.     

Measures of discrimination for latent group-based trajectory models

In clinical research, patient care decisions are often easier to make if patients are classified into a manageable number of groups based on homogeneous risk patterns. Investigators can use latent group-based trajectory modeling to estimate the posterior probabilities that an individual will be classified into a particular group of risk patterns. Although this method is increasingly used in clinical research, there is currently no measure that can be used to determine whether an individual's group assignment has a high level of discrimination. In this study, we propose a discrimination index and provide confidence intervals of the probability of the assigned group for each individual. We also propose a modified form of entropy to measure discrimination. The two proposed measures were applied to assess the group assignments of the longitudinal patterns of conduct disorders among young adolescent girls.     

Asymptotic Confidence Intervals for a New Inequality Measure

This work aims at assessing, by simulation methods, the performance of asymptotic confidence intervals for Zenga's new inequality measure. The results are compared with those obtained on Gini's measure, perhaps the most widely used index for measuring inequality in income and wealth distributions. Our findings show that the coverage accuracy and the size of the confidence intervals for the two measures are very similar in samples from economic size distributions.     

A “Reverse Order” Elementary Statistics Course

A family of coefficients for measuring monotone association is presented. These include measures of association of ordinal or interval variables such as gamma of Goodman and Kruskal, Somers's d_yx , Kendall's tau, or Spearman's rho as special cases. The article shows how a large number of measures of association can be put into a single general form. These coefficients are used as a basis for defining a variety of data analysis techniques.     

An extension of the von mises distribution

Directional distribution theory is very useful for the estimation of directional spectra needed for the analysis of time series data. A four parameter directional exponential family is discussed. Depending on the values of its parameters this distribution can be unimodal symmetric, bimodal symmetric, unimodal non-symmetric, or bimodal non-symmetric. The moments of this distribution are found, and equations leading to maximum-likelihood estimates of the parameters along with an outline on numerical procedures for solving these equations are given. FORTRAN subroutines implementing these procedures are available from the authors. Finally, some applications of the new directional density are given.     

CASE-DELETION DIAGNOSTICS FOR TEST STATISTICS IN MULTIVARIATE REGRESSION

Influence measures in multivariate regression analysis have been widely developed, especially through use of the case-deletion approach. However, there seem to be few accounts of the influence of observations on test statistics in hypothesis testing. This paper examines four common multivariate tests, namely the Wilks' ratio, Lawley-Hotelling trace, Pillai's trace and Roy's greatest root for testing a general linear hypothesis of the regression coefficients in multivariate regression. The influence of observations is measured using the case-deletion approach. The proposed diagnostic measures, except that of Roy's greatest root, can be expressed in terms of statistics without involving the actual deletion of observations. An illustrative example is given with satisfactory results.     

Importance of Components for a System

Which component is most important for a system's survival? We answer this question by ranking the information relationship between a system and its components. The mutual information (M) measures dependence between the operational states of the system and a component for a mission time as well as between their life lengths. This measure ranks each component in terms of its expected utility for predicting the system's survival. We explore some relationships between the ordering of importance of components by M and by Zellner's Maximal Data Information (MDIP) criterion. For many systems the bivariate distribution of the component and system lifetimes does not have a density with respect to the two-dimensional Lebesgue measure. For these systems, M is not defined, so we use a modification of a mutual information index to cover such situations. Our results for ordering dependence are general in terms of binary structures, sum of random variables, and order statistics.     

CATANOVA for two-way cross classified categorical data

In this article we develop an extension of categorical analysis of variance for one response and two factors, based on a partitioning of a measure of predictability for three-way contingency tables, known as Gray and Williams's index. At the first instance moment the decomposition of this multiple measure of association in partial association measures is shown. Finally, for ordinal-scale variables, we propose an extension of this decomposition using a particular set of orthogonal polynomials.     

Investigating the sensitivity function's monotony of a health-related index

In this work it is investigated theoretically whether the support's length of a continuous variable, which represents a simple health-related index, affects the index's diagnostic ability of a binary health outcome. The aforementioned is attempted by studying the monotony of the index's sensitivity function, which is a measure of its diagnostic ability, in the cases that the index's distribution was either unknown or the uniform. The case of a composite health-related index which is formed by the sum of m component variables is also presented when the distribution of its component variables was either unknown or the uniform. It is proved that a health-related index's sensitivity is a non-decreasing function as to the finite length of its components' support, under certain condition. In addition, similar propositions are presented in the case that a health-related index is distributed normally according to its distribution parameters.     

Some Sampling Properties of a Model for Income Distribution

A recently proposed model for describing the distribution of income over a population, based on the Burr distribution, has been shown to fit better than the commonly used lognormal or gamma distributions. The current article extends that analysis by deriving the large-sample properties of the maximum likelihood estimates for this three-parameter model. Consequently, resulting confidence intervals for some measures of income inequality (including the Gini index) are used to further test the model's validity, as well as to examine apparent trends in inequality over time. Since these properties depend on the way the income data are grouped and censored, implications for choosing data-report intervals can be analyzed. Specifically, a choice between two common methods of reporting the data is shown to have an important impact on Gini index estimates.     

Measurement Problems of Inflation Disaggregation

Why do the three quarterly GNP inflation measures differ so much when they are constructed from the same underlying price data? Algebraically and in tables using data of the second quarter of 1984, it is shown that these differences occur because of quarterly shifts in the composition of the nation's product. Disaggregation of the inflation contributions of the GNP components also makes it clear why, for quarterly analyses, the GNP chain price index is superior to both the implicit GNP deflator and the fixed-weight GNP price index. In particular, the implicit GNP deflator can give severely distorted inflation signals.     

Cumulative correspondence analysis using orthogonal polynomials

Taguchi's statistic has long been known to be a more appropriate measure of association of the dependence for ordinal variables compared to the Pearson chi-squared statistic. Therefore, there is some advantage in using Taguchi's statistic in the correspondence analysis context when a two-way contingency table consists at least of an ordinal categorical variable. The aim of this paper, considering the contingency table with two ordinal categorical variables, is to show a decomposition of Taguchi's index into linear, quadratic and higher-order components. This decomposition has been developed using Emerson's orthogonal polynomials. Moreover, two case studies to explain the methodology have been analyzed.     

中国城市空气质量的“春节效应”分析——来自31个重点城市的经验证据

近年来,空气污染成为大家十分关注的话题。2014年春节期间,山东、河北、江苏、陕西等省份的多个城市空气质量指数频频爆表,出现了严重的空气污染。分别以2007-2012年、2014年31个重点城市春节期间及其前后的空气质量指数、污染物排放量及人口密度、工业比重、所处区域、客运量等资料为基础,分析了31个重点城市空气质量是否存在显著的"春节效应"。研究表明,城市空气质量的"春节效应"主要表现为"节后效应"。春节期间的空气污染指数比非春节期间高出约6.37%,集中供暖区域的空气污染指数比非集中供暖区域高出约37.04%。2014年城市空气质量存在显著"节后效应"的主要原因是PM2.5、PM10在春节期间的排放量显著高于春节后的排放量。从总量上严格控制春节期间烟花爆竹的燃放数量,并尽快改善北方城市的供暖方式、供暖来源应作为防治空气污染的考虑方向。     

Asymptotic normality for plug-in estimators of diversity indices on countable alphabets

The plug-in estimator is one of the most popular approaches to the estimation of diversity indices. In this paper, we study its asymptotic distribution for a large class of diversity indices on countable alphabets. In particular, we give conditions for the plug-in estimator to be asymptotically normal, and in the case of uniform distributions, where asymptotic normality fails, we give conditions for the asymptotic distribution to be chi-squared. Our results cover some of the most commonly used indices, including Simpson's index, Reńyi's entropy and Shannon's entropy.     

Correspondence Analysis of Cumulative Frequencies Using a Decomposition of Taguchi's Statistic

Taguchi's statistic has long been known to be a more appropriate measure of association for ordinal variables than the Pearson chi-squared statistic. Therefore, there is some advantage in using Taguchi's statistic for performing correspondence analysis when a two-way contingency table consists of one ordinal categorical variable. This article will explore the development of correspondence analysis using a decomposition of Taguchi's statistic.     

Criteria for Linear Model Selection Based on Kullback's Symmetric Divergence

Model selection criteria are frequently developed by constructing estimators of discrepancy measures that assess the disparity between the 'true' model and a fitted approximating model. The Akaike information criterion (AIC) and its variants result from utilizing Kullback's directed divergence as the targeted discrepancy. The directed divergence is an asymmetric measure of separation between two statistical models, meaning that an alternative directed divergence can be obtained by reversing the roles of the two models in the definition of the measure. The sum of the two directed divergences is Kullback's symmetric divergence. In the framework of linear models, a comparison of the two directed divergences reveals an important distinction between the measures. When used to evaluate fitted approximating models that are improperly specified, the directed divergence which serves as the basis for AIC is more sensitive towards detecting overfitted models, whereas its counterpart is more sensitive towards detecting underfitted models. Since the symmetric divergence combines the information in both measures, it functions as a gauge of model disparity which is arguably more balanced than either of its individual components. With this motivation, the paper proposes a new class of criteria for linear model selection based on targeting the symmetric divergence. The criteria can be regarded as analogues of AIC and two of its variants: 'corrected' AIC or AICc and 'modified' AIC or MAIC. The paper examines the selection tendencies of the new criteria in a simulation study and the results indicate that they perform favourably when compared to their AIC analogues.     

基于LSTAR模型的中国股市泡沫风险识别

本文在非线性模型框架下拟合中国主要股价指数的真实数据生成过程,并提出股市泡沫风险识别方法,较Phillips et al.（2011）提出的上确界单位根(SADF)方法具备更好的效果,能够精准预判股市泡沫风险进而为防范化解金融风险的政策措施提供参考。实证检验发现,主要股价指数的波动均存在逻辑平滑转换自回归(LSTAR)模型描述的非线性特征,自推出以来,四大股价指数均存在泡沫风险,上证指数存在六个主要的持续期,深圳成指存在四个主要的持续期,沪深300指数存在两个主要持续期,而创业板指数存在三个持续期。总体来看,创业板指数的泡沫生成时间会先于其它三大指数,可以作为预警中国股票市场泡沫风险的先行指标,且2015年7月之后的中国股票市场并不存在泡沫风险。