Efficiency analysis of university departments: An empirical study

Universities play an important role in the development of a country in this age of the knowledge economy. As government subsidies to universities have been reducing in recent years, the more efficient use of resources becomes an important issue for university administrators. This paper applies data envelopment analysis (DEA) to assess the relative efficiency of the academic departments at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan. The outputs considered are total credit-hours, publications, and external grants; and the inputs utilized by the departments are personnel, operating expenses, and floor space. An assurance region is constructed by the top administrators of the university to confine the flexibility in selecting the virtual multipliers in DEA. Four groups of departments of similar characteristics are categorized via an efficiency decomposition and cluster analysis. The aggregate efficiency indicates whether the resources have been utilized efficiently by a department and the efficiency decomposition helps identify the weak areas where more effort should be devoted so that the efficiency of the department can be improved.     

Estimation methods for time‐dependent AUC models with survival data

The performance of clinical tests for disease screening is often evaluated using the area under the receiver‐operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC). Recent developments have extended the traditional setting to the AUC with binary time‐varying failure status. Without considering covariates, our first theme is to propose a simple and easily computed nonparametric estimator for the time‐dependent AUC. Moreover, we use generalized linear models with time‐varying coefficients to characterize the time‐dependent AUC as a function of covariate values. The corresponding estimation procedures are proposed to estimate the parameter functions of interest. The derived limiting Gaussian processes and the estimated asymptotic variances enable us to construct the approximated confidence regions for the AUCs. The finite sample properties of our proposed estimators and inference procedures are examined through extensive simulations. An analysis of the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG) 175 data is further presented to show the applicability of the proposed methods. The Canadian Journal of Statistics 38:8–26; 2010 © 2009 Statistical Society of Canada     

Non‐parametric estimation for time-dependent AUC

The area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve (AUC) is one of the commonly used measure to evaluate or compare the predictive ability of markers to the disease status. Motivated by an angiographic coronary artery disease (CAD) study, our objective is mainly to evaluate and compare the performance of several baseline plasma levels in the prediction of CAD-related vital status over time. Based on censored survival data, the non-parametric estimators are proposed for the time-dependent AUC. The limiting Gaussian processes of the estimators and the estimated asymptotic variance–covariance functions enable us to further construct confidence bands and develop testing procedures. Applications and finite sample properties of the proposed estimation methods and inference procedures are demonstrated through the CAD-related death data from the British Columbia Vital Statistics Agency and Monte Carlo simulations.     

Changing trends of prostate cancer in Asia

Although Asian people have the lowest incidence and mortality rates of prostate cancer in the world, these rates have risen rapidly in the past two decades in most Asian countries. Prostate cancer has become one of the leading male cancers in some Asian countries. In 2000, the age-adjusted incidence was over 10 per 100?000 men in Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and Israel. Although some of the increases may result from enhanced detection, much of the increased incidence may be associated with westernization of the lifestyle, with increasing obesity and increased consumption of fat. The differences in incidences between native Americans and Asian immigrants are getting smaller, reflecting a possible improvement of diagnostic efforts and changes of environmental risk factors in Asian immigrants. Nevertheless, the huge variations in incidences among ethnic groups imply that there are important genetic risk factors. The stage distributions of prostate cancer in Asian populations are still unfavorable compared to those of Western developed countries. However, a trend towards diagnosing cancer with more favorable prognosis is seen in most Asian countries. Both genetic and environmental risk factors responsible for elevated risks in Asian people are being identified, which may help to reduce prostate cancer incidence in a chemopreventive setting.     

The johnson translation system in monte carlo studies

Multivariate lognormal and sinh^-1-normal random vectors, members of the Johnson family, can be generated by direct transformation of multinormal random vectors. Formulae for specifying the parameters of the multinomial distribution in terms of the first and second order moments of the desired multivariate lognormal or sinh^-1-normal distribution are given. These results facilitate the use of these distributions in Monte Carlo studies. In some previous studies employing these distributions, the effect of non-normality was confounded with that of unequal covariance structure.     

The Estimation and Inference of a Panel Cointegration Model with a Time Trend

This article investigates the asymptotic properties of coefficient estimators in the panel cointegration model with a time trend. We find that the bias of OLS estimator for the slope coefficient in the panel cointegration model with a time trend is distinct from that in the panel cointegration model without a time trend. Meanwhile, the variance of the limiting distribution for the slope coefficient is larger in the panel cointegration model with a time trend than without a time trend.     

Management performance: An empirical study of the manufacturing companies in Taiwan

This paper proposes a methodology to measure the management performance of the firms of an industry. The idea is to break down the very complicated concept of management into subjects such that the performance of each subject can be measured. The performances of all subjects are then aggregated to form an overall performance of management. The weights associated with the subjects which play a decisive role in aggregation are determined from a two-stage method. This method takes into account both the experience of the experts and the reality reflected by the data collected from the firms. Therefore, the weights generated are more acceptable to the firms. An example of the manufacturing firms in Taiwan illustrates how management is broken down into subjects and how their performances are aggregated. A regression analysis shows that management, in addition to capital and labor, makes a significant contribution to organizational performance. Although the discussion of this paper is confined to the manufacturing industry in Taiwan, the methodology can be applied to other industries and other countries.     

Emotional Reactivity to Daily Family Conflicts: Testing the Within-Person Sensitization

Although the sensitization hypothesis posits that heightened reactivity to interparental conflict is linked to adolescent psychopathology, limited studies tested whether sensitization would emerge in parent-adolescent conflict and across ethnicity or culture. This study revisits the sensitization hypothesis by examining adolescent emotional reactivity to interparental and parent-adolescent conflicts on a daily timescale. The sample included 163 adolescents (55% girls; M_age = 12.79) and their parents (78% females; M_age = 45.46) who completed a 10-day reports in Taiwan. Multilevel modeling results showed that, instead of interparental conflict, adolescents with greater histories of parent-adolescent conflict exhibited higher emotional reactivity when parent-adolescent conflict was higher. The findings underscore the importance of parent-adolescent conflict in evaluating adolescent developmental risk.     

A Game-Theoretic Approach to Quantity Discount Problems*

The traditional quantity discount problem is analyzed from the perspective of game theory, including both noncooperative and cooperative models. For the noncooperative case, the Stackelberg equilibrium is derived. For the cooperative case, the Pareto Optimality criteria are used to find a group of optimal strategies. Both scenarios are illustrated through an example which quantifies the benefits resulting from cooperation between the buyer and the seller for game-theoretic solutions using geometric programming.     

Adaptively leveraging external data with robust meta-analytical-predictive prior using empirical Bayes

The robust meta-analytical-predictive (rMAP) prior is a popular method to robustly leverage external data. However, a mixture coefficient would need to be pre-specified based on the anticipated level of prior-data conflict. This can be very challenging at the study design stage. We propose a novel empirical Bayes robust MAP (EB-rMAP) prior to address this practical need and adaptively leverage external/historical data. Built on Box's prior predictive p-value, the EB-rMAP prior framework balances between model parsimony and flexibility through a tuning parameter. The proposed framework can be applied to binomial, normal, and time-to-event endpoints. Implementation of the EB-rMAP prior is also computationally efficient. Simulation results demonstrate that the EB-rMAP prior is robust in the presence of prior-data conflict while preserving statistical power. The proposed EB-rMAP prior is then applied to a clinical dataset that comprises 10 oncology clinical trials, including the prospective study.