Estimating the exponential reliability function for a system in series with type II censored data

The problem of estimating the one parameter exponential reliability function for a system composed of l componentes in series is considered. Under the type II censoring scheme, the Bayes nature of the minimum variance unbiased estimator is demonstrated and the admissibility of related generalized Bayes estimators is established. For the one component case, the best unbiased estimator is admissible.     

On the usefulness of knowledge of error variances in the consistent estimation of an unreplicated ultrastructural model

This article considers an unreplicated ultrastructural model and discusses the asymptotic properties of three consistent estimators of slope parameter arising from the knowledge of measurement error variances. Conditions are deduced when knowing the error variances associated with both the study and the explanatory variables is more/less beneficial than using a single error variance in the formulation of slope estimators.     

Testing parallelism of regression lines against ordered alternatives

For the problem of testing the equality of slopes of several regression lines against the alternative that the slopes are in increasing (decreasing) order of magnitude, two types of tests are proposed. These are the likelihood ratio test and a test that depends on suitable linear combination of one group statistics. Rank analogues of the two tests are also examined.     

Reliability Research of Dependent Failure Systems Using Copula

The computation of reliability characteristics of a system that consists of dependent components sometimes becomes difficult, especially when a specific type of dependence is not identified. In this paper, some systems with arbitrary dependent components are studied using copula. In the system, the components are dependent on each other and the dependent relations may be either linear or nonlinear correlation. The efficient formulas are presented to compute the reliability characteristics, such as reliability function, failure rate and meantime to failure of series, parallel and k-out-of-n systems. The reliability functions of dependant systems are compared with independent system. At last, the numerical examples are presented to illustrate the results obtained in this paper.     

Exclusion restrictions in instrumental variables equations

In this paper we consider two-stage estimators of parameters of a structural equation in a model with recursive exclusion restrictions on the instrumental variables equations. The estimations considered are simple OLS and GLS estimators after substitution of estimates of the systematic part of the IV equations for the endogenous variables. It is known in the literature that neither imposing the restrictions in the first stage nor ignoring them will in general be more efficient than the alternative. We introduce a class of mixed instrumental variables estimators (MIV) with these possibilities as special cases which yields an estimator which is not only more efficient than the two stage estimators considered in the literature but as efficient as an efficient system estimator like 3SLS.     

Random Accessibility as a Parallelism to Reliability Studies on Simple Graphs

ABSTRACT

Graphs are classified according to the numbers of vertices and edges they contain. For simple graphs a concept of accessibility is defined and its relation to the graph reliability problem is investigated. Exact results are derived for special subclasses of bipartite and tripartite graphs in relation to accessibility. Several conjectures on the relation of accessibility and all-terminal reliability are numerically illustrated without proof.     

Portfolio assessment in a collaborative program evaluation: the reliability and validity of a family literacy portfolio

Evaluations increasingly use open-ended assessments, such as portfolios, to gather information about program impact. Portfolios, however, present challenges in achieving acceptable levels of reliability and often lack evidence to support validity. This article describes the components of a portfolio assessment system developed in a collaborative evaluation of a family literacy program. Staff of a family literacy program and two evaluators collaborated to develop the assessment and the tools that frame the review of the portfolios. Rubrics, exemplar portfolios, portfolio logs, and lists of ‘look-fors’ were developed to guide raters in the scoring and to improve the reliability of scores and validity of decisions about the program. Inter-rater reliability for the portfolio assessment was 0.79 for holistic scores and 0.74 for analytic scores. With respect to validity, holistic and analytic scores correlated with criterion measures from 0.50 to 0.59, providing initial evidence of a common construct.     

Hopfield神经网络k－全局稳定性

研究了Ｈｏｐｆｉｅｌｄ神经网络的ｋ－全局稳定性，利用常数变易法和不等式分析技巧，给出了Ｈｏｐｆｉｅｌｄ神经网络的ｋ－全局指数稳定的充分条件。     

基于数码相机图像的三维重构

针对传统三维坐标测量方法的局限性，提出了利用数码相机对物体进行三维重构，达到对物体进行非接触测量的目的．采用标准图像法对数码相机内部和外部参数分别标定，与传统的相机标定相比，简化了求解的复杂性．基于同一物体的两幅图像，给出了其三维重建理论和算法．并举例说明了三维重构的具体实现步骤和方法．