The World Fertility Survey: an appraisal of methodology

"In the first half of the article, a broad account of content and procedures is given. In conduct of individual surveys, the achievements of the World Fertility Survey were based on thoroughness rather than technical superiority. The later aspects of the program, including analysis, archiving, and data dissemination, were more innovative and represent models of excellence for similar future enquiries. In overall terms, the program is judged to be an expensive success. In the second half of the article, two methodological issues are discussed in more detail: the collection of retrospective birth histories and the translation of survey instruments into local languages." Comments by Anthony G. Turner (pp. 768-9), Kweku T. de Graft-Johnson (pp. 769-70), Burton Singer (pp. 771-2), and Joel E. Cohen (pp. 772-4) are appended.     

各族人民共同当家做主:中国特色社会主义民主政治的体现

胡锦涛总书记在党的十七大报告中宣示,中国的改革开放和社会政治发展将继续"高举中国特色社会主义伟大旗帜,坚定不移地走中国特色社会主义道路".这个报告既是党在新时期的政治宣言,又是党领导全国各族人民全面推进小康社会建设的行动纲领.     

"兴边富民行动"的意义

兴边富民行动是根据党中央的精神,为配合西部大开发战略,加快边境地区经济社会发展,由国家民委倡导发起的、于2000年初启动的一项边境开发工程。兴边富民行动得到了党中央、国务院的高度重视和充分肯定。兴边富民行动成就喜人,已成为边境地区经济社会发展的加速器和催化剂。兴边富民行动,对于富民、兴边、强国、睦邻,巩固祖国的万里边疆,具有非常重要的意义。     

中国共产党少数民族经济政策的形成和发展--中国共产党民族纲领政策形成和发展研究之十二

发展少数民族经济的政策是我党的一项重要民族政策.本文论述了新民主主义革命时期我党少数民族经济政策的形成和发展过程,论述了新中国建立以来,特别是改革开放以来党和政府民族经济政策的发展和完善过程.     

Mini-batch learning of exponential family finite mixture models

Mini-batch algorithms have become increasingly popular due to the requirement for solving optimization problems, based on large-scale data sets. Using an existing online expectation–maximization (EM) algorithm framework, we demonstrate how mini-batch (MB) algorithms may be constructed, and propose a scheme for the stochastic stabilization of the constructed mini-batch algorithms. Theoretical results regarding the convergence of the mini-batch EM algorithms are presented. We then demonstrate how the mini-batch framework may be applied to conduct maximum likelihood (ML) estimation of mixtures of exponential family distributions, with emphasis on ML estimation for mixtures of normal distributions. Via a simulation study, we demonstrate that the mini-batch algorithm for mixtures of normal distributions can outperform the standard EM algorithm. Further evidence of the performance of the mini-batch framework is provided via an application to the famous MNIST data set.     

Likelihood-free approximate Gibbs sampling

Likelihood-free methods such as approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) have extended the reach of statistical inference to problems with computationally intractable likelihoods. Such approaches perform well for small-to-moderate dimensional problems, but suffer a curse of dimensionality in the number of model parameters. We introduce a likelihood-free approximate Gibbs sampler that naturally circumvents the dimensionality issue by focusing on lower-dimensional conditional distributions. These distributions are estimated by flexible regression models either before the sampler is run, or adaptively during sampler implementation. As a result, and in comparison to Metropolis-Hastings-based approaches, we are able to fit substantially more challenging statistical models than would otherwise be possible. We demonstrate the sampler’s performance via two simulated examples, and a real analysis of Airbnb rental prices using a intractable high-dimensional multivariate nonlinear state-space model with a 36-dimensional latent state observed on 365 time points, which presents a real challenge to standard ABC techniques.     

Abundance estimation with a categorical covariate subject to missing in continuous-time capture-recapture studies

Abstract

In continuous-time capture-recapture experiments, individual heterogeneity has a large effect on the capture probability. To account for the heterogeneity, we consider an individual covariate, which is categorical and subject to missing. In this article, we develop a general model to summarize three kinds of missing mechanisms, and propose a maximum likelihood estimator of the abundance. A likelihood ratio confidence interval of the abundance is also proposed. We illustrate the proposed methods by simulation studies and a real data example of a bird species prinia subflava in Hong Kong.