On the estimation of extreme directional multivariate quantiles

Abstract

In multivariate extreme value theory (MEVT), the focus is on analysis outside of the observable sampling zone, which implies that the region of interest is associated to high risk levels. This work provides tools to include directional notions into the MEVT, giving the opportunity to characterize the recently introduced directional multivariate quantiles (DMQ) at high levels. Then, an out-sample estimation method for these quantiles is given. A bootstrap procedure carries out the estimation of the tuning parameter in this multivariate framework and helps with the estimation of the DMQ. Asymptotic normality for the proposed estimator is provided and the methodology is illustrated with simulated data-sets. Finally, a real-life application to a financial case is also performed.     

Anti-politics and the scourge of authoritarianism

The performance of American politics, in the age of Donald Trump, has been reduced to a carnival of unbridled narcissism, deception, spectacle, and overloaded sensation. What happens to a democracy when it loses all semblance of public memory, and the welfare state and social contract are abandoned in order to fill the coffers of bankers, hedge fund managers, and the corporate elite? What happens when disposable populations are brushed clean from our collective conscience, and are the object of unchecked humiliation and disdain by the financial elite? In trying to grapple with such questions, this paper suggests that when democratic agency amounts to an electoral choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, we enter into a ‘world order’ of anti-politics – a ‘collective will’ shorn of both the promise of transformation and a future of democracy. What follows reflects on the possibility of a new language of liberation, at a time when language itself has lost its potential for reference in a culture of compulsive forgetting and myth-making. The task ahead of us, this essay maintains, calls for a coming together of broad-based social struggles in the everyday with a relentless questioning of what passes for neoliberal ‘commonsense’.     

Factors associated with mobile health information seeking among Singaporean women

This study examined effects of age and social psychological factors on women’s willingness to be mobile health information seekers. A national survey of 1,878 Singaporean women was conducted to obtain information on women’s mobile phone usage, experiences of health information seeking, and appraisals of using mobile phones to seek health information. Results showed that young, middle-aged, and older women exhibited distinct mobile phone usage behaviors, health information-seeking patterns, and assessments of mobile health information seeking. Factors that accounted for their mobile information-seeking intention also varied. Data reported in this study provide insights into mobile health interventions in the future.     

Gro¨bner basis strategies in regression

The Gröbner basis method in experimental design (Pistone & Wynn, 1996) is developed in a practical setting. The computational algebraic techniques (Gröbner bases in particular) are coupled with statistical strategies and the links to more standard approaches made. A new method of analysing a non-orthogonal experiment based on the Gröbner basis method is introduced. Examples are given utilizing the approaches.     

Standing on the Shoulders of a Giant: Remembrances of Jack Michael,Part 2

In Part 1 of these remembrances of Jack Michael, we briefly described Jack’s history in terms of how he became a behavior analyst (Sundberg & Schlinger, 2021). We pointed out that he was one of the first to apply the principles of behavior analysis discovered in the experimental laboratory to the area of rehabilitation. In so doing, Jack was perhaps the first applied behavior analyst. In Part 1, some of his former students and close associates from his early years at the University of Houston, Arizona State University, and Western Michigan University—John Mabry, Grayson Osborne, Jon Bailey, Mark Sundberg, and J. Vincent Carbone—provided their personal tributes to Jack. In Part 2, we offer six more tributes that—with one exception, that of Ted Ayllon—provide insight into Jack’s work in the latter part of his career. In addition to Ted Ayllon, these tributes are from Jack’s students and close associates Hank Schlinger, Dave Palmer, John and Barb Esch, Carl Sundberg, and Caio Miguel. The authors provide insights not only into their views about Jack but also into their own lives. Collectively, they paint a picture of people from different backgrounds that all found their way to Jack Michael and to behavior analysis. To a person, they describe how their behavior, whether as scientists, practitioners, or both, was radically transformed as a result, and how they attribute that change largely to Jack’s influence.     

Jack Michael,Behavior Analyst

Jack Michael was the quintessential behavior analyst. Despite his reputation as a theoretician and expert in verbal behavior and on Skinner’s book Verbal Behavior, Jack was actually an applied behavior analyst in the literal sense before anyone had coined the term. Prior to becoming one of Jack’s doctoral students at Western Michigan University, I was a behavior-analytic neophyte. After I graduated and began my own teaching (modeled after Jack’s behavior-analytic method of teaching) and thinking and writing about behavior analysis, I found myself talking and thinking like Jack. He had a similar behavior changing effect not only on many of his other students, but also on others who had the good fortune to know him.