The Folded Logistic Distribution

ABSTRACT

Physical measurements like dimensions, including time, and angles in scientific experiments are frequently recorded without their algebraic sign. The directions of those physical quantities measured with respect to a frame of reference in most practical applications are considered to be unimportant and are ignored. As a consequence, the underlying distribution of measurements is replaced by a distribution of absolute measurements. When the underlying distribution is logistic, the resulting distribution is called the “folded logistic distribution”. Here, the properties of the folded logistic distribution will be presented and the techniques for estimating parameters will be given. The advantages of using this folded logistic distribution over the folded normal distribution will be discussed and some examples will be cited.     

On a Class of Distributions Defined by the Relationship Between Their Density and Distribution Functions

Knowledge concerning the family of univariate continuous distributions with density function f and distribution function F defined through the relation f(x) = F ^α(x)(1 ? F(x))^β, α, β ? , is reviewed and modestly extended. Symmetry, modality, tail behavior, order statistics, shape properties based on the mode, L-moments, and—for the first time—transformations between members of the family are the general properties considered. Fully tractable special cases include all the complementary beta distributions (including uniform, power law and cosine distributions), the logistic, exponential and Pareto distributions, the Student t distribution on 2 degrees of freedom and, newly, the distribution corresponding to α = β = 5/2. The logistic distribution is central to some of the developments of the article.     

Sums of weighted spacings and a test for the logistic distribution

A simple proof for a theorem of Csörgö and Révész (1981b and 1984) concerning sums of weighted spacings is given, The conditions of the theorem are relaxed. As an application, a goodness-of-fit test for the logistic distribution is proposed. The percentage points of the proposed test statistic are obtained by a simulation experiment.     

On an application of the diffusion approximation of the generalized birth and death process for stochastic population projection

Assuming that both birth and death rates are density and time dependent, a diffusion approximation of the generalized birth and death process has been considered in this paper to obtain a suitable stochastic population model describing the population size and its moments. A simple method of estimating the parameters of the model Is discussed. The predictions of the expected size of the population, and the variance are made and compared with the corresponding census figures as well as with another deterministic projection series made for the corresponding period.     

The generalized log-gamma mixture model with covariates: local influence and residual analysis

In a sample of censored survival times, the presence of an immune proportion of individuals who are not subject to death, failure or relapse, may be indicated by a relatively high number of individuals with large censored survival times. In this paper the generalized log-gamma model is modified for the possibility that long-term survivors may be present in the data. The model attempts to separately estimate the effects of covariates on the surviving fraction, that is, the proportion of the population for which the event never occurs. The logistic function is used for the regression model of the surviving fraction. Inference for the model parameters is considered via maximum likelihood. Some influence methods, such as the local influence and total local influence of an individual are derived, analyzed and discussed. Finally, a data set from the medical area is analyzed under the log-gamma generalized mixture model. A residual analysis is performed in order to select an appropriate model. The authors would like to thank the editor and referees for their helpful comments. This work was supported by CNPq, Brazil.     

Factors influencing Soay sheep survival

We present a survival analysis of Soay sheep mark recapture and recovery data. Unlike previous conditional analyses, it is not necessary to assume equality of recovery and recapture probabilities; instead these are estimated by maximum likelihood. Male and female sheep are treated separately, with the higher numbers and survival probabilities of the females resulting in a more complex model than that used for the males. In both cases, however, age and time aspects need to be included and there is a strong indication of a reduction in survival for sheep aged 7 years or more. Time variation in survival is related to the size of the population and selected weather variables, by using logistic regression. The size of the population significantly affects the survival probabilities of male and female lambs, and of female sheep aged 7 or more years. March rainfall and a measure of the North Atlantic oscillation are found to influence survival significantly for all age groups considered, for both males and females. Either of these weather variables can be used in a model. Several phenotypic and genotypic individual covariates are also fitted. The only covariate which is found to influence survival significantly is the type of horn of first-year female sheep. There is a substantial variation in the recovery probabilities over time, reflecting in part the increased effort when a population crash was expected. The goodness of fit of the model is checked by using graphical procedures.     

Lassoing the Determinants of Retirement

This article uses Danish register data to explain the retirement decision of workers in 1990 and 1998. Many variables might be conjectured to influence this decision such as demographic, socioeconomic, financial, and health related variables as well as all the same factors for the spouse in case the individual is married. In total, we have access to 399 individual specific variables that all could potentially impact the retirement decision. We use variants of the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso) and the adaptive Lasso applied to logistic regression in order to uncover determinants of the retirement decision. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of these estimators in microeconometrics to a problem of this type and scale. Furthermore, we investigate whether the factors influencing the retirement decision are stable over time, gender, and marital status. It is found that this is the case for core variables such as age, income, wealth, and general health. We also point out the most important differences between these groups and explain why these might be present.     

New Shrinkage Parameters for the Liu-type Logistic Estimators

The binary logistic regression is a widely used statistical method when the dependent variable has two categories. In most of the situations of logistic regression, independent variables are collinear which is called the multicollinearity problem. It is known that multicollinearity affects the variance of maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) negatively. Therefore, this article introduces new shrinkage parameters for the Liu-type estimators in the Liu (2003) in the logistic regression model defined by Huang (2012) in order to decrease the variance and overcome the problem of multicollinearity. A Monte Carlo study is designed to show the goodness of the proposed estimators over MLE in the sense of mean squared error (MSE) and mean absolute error (MAE). Moreover, a real data case is given to demonstrate the advantages of the new shrinkage parameters.     

Comparative Study of Generalized Estimating Equations and Logistic Regressions on Different Sample Sizes and Correlation Levels

In this study, it was aimed to determine accuracy of generalized estimating equations versus logistic regressions on different correlation levels and sample sizes. For this aim, two methods were compared with different sample sizes 10, 25, 50 and 100 and correlation levels 0.0, 0.3, 0.5 and 0.8. Result of this study showed that using generalized estimating equations could be preferred versus logistic regression when the sample size is over than 25 and correlation level is higher than 0.3 on data taken from studies with repeated measurements, but logistic regression could be better when the autocorrelations do not exist.     

牧地承包经营权转让意愿影响因素研究——基于农户劳动力配置视角

基于西部3省731户农(牧)户的实地调研数据,从农(牧)户劳动力配置视角分析了牧地承包经营权转让意愿的影响因素。研究结果表明:务牧人口数、近三年务牧消耗、务牧技能水平等对牧地承包经营权转出意愿有显著的负向影响;务工兼牧业人口数、务工技能水平和户均单位土地劳动投入对牧地承包经营权转出意愿有显著的正向影响;务工人口数、户主受教育程度等对牧地承包经营权转让意愿的影响不显著。