A longitudinal analysis of infant and senescent mortality using mixture models

We construct a mixture distribution including infant, exogenous and Gompertzian/non-Gompertzian senescent mortality. Using mortality data from Swedish females 1751–, we show that this outperforms models without these features, and compare its trends in cohort and period mortality over time. We find an almost complete disappearance of exogenous mortality within the last century of period mortality, with cohort mortality approaching the same limits. Both Gompertzian and non-Gompertzian senescent mortality are consistently present, with the estimated balance between them oscillating constantly. While the parameters of the latter appear to be trending over time, the parameters of the former do not.     

Decomposing the predictive performance of the moving average trading rule of technical analysis: the contribution of linear and non-linear dependencies in stock returns

The main purpose of this work is to decompose the predictive performance of the moving average (MA) trading rule and find out the portion that could be attributed to the possible exploitation of linear and non-linear dependencies in stock returns. Data from the General Index of the Athens Stock Exchange, from the Standard and Poor-500 Index of the New York Stock Exchange and from the Austrian Traded Index of the Vienna Stock Exchange are filtered by linear filters so as the resulting simulated ‘returns’ exhibit no serial correlation. Applying MA trading rules to both the original and the simulated indices and using a new statistical testing procedure that takes into account the sensitivity of the performance of the trading rule as a function of the length of the MA it is found that the predictive performance of the trading rule is clearly weakened when applied to the simulated indices indicating that a substantial part of the rule's predictive performance is due to the exploitation of linear dependencies in stock returns. This weakening is uneven; in general the shorter the MA length the more pronounced the attenuation.     

Generalized estimating equations for mixtures with varying concentrations

A finite mixture model is considered in which the mixing probabilities vary from observation to observation. A parametric model is assumed for one mixture component distribution, while the others are nonparametric nuisance parameters. Generalized estimating equations (GEE) are proposed for the semi‐parametric estimation. Asymptotic normality of the GEE estimates is demonstrated and the lower bound for their dispersion (asymptotic covariance) matrix is derived. An adaptive technique is developed to derive estimates with nearly optimal small dispersion. An application to the sociological analysis of voting results is discussed. The Canadian Journal of Statistics 41: 217–236; 2013 © 2013 Statistical Society of Canada     

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U. S. National Income Series Revised—Congress Votes No on Censuses of Business and Manufactures—Britain Revises Living Cost Index-U. S. and U. K. Surveys Uncover Lacks in Statistical Training-Forthcoming Statistical Conferences     

人口普查覆盖误差估计方法综述

人口普查工作的质量主要体现在覆盖误差的规模上.人口统计学家创建了估计人口普查覆盖误差的方法.有些方法利用独立于人口普查本身的信息,另外一些方法则利用人口行政记录的信息.由于每种方法都有其特定的形成背景和适用范围,因而没有适合于所有国家和地区的通用方法.通过对美国、新西兰、澳大利亚、英国和中国的人口普查覆盖误差估计方法进行了较为详细的介绍,说明了这些方法的使用情况.研究表明,任何一种估计方法都有其局限性,需要不断改进与完善.     

健康在多大程度上引致贫困脆弱性——基于CHNS农村数据的经验分析

贫困脆弱性的产生,很大程度上归因于居民健康水平的下降.在阐述健康引致贫困理论机制的基础上,基于CHNS在2000-2009年间追踪调查数据,对贫困脆弱性和健康效用指数HUI进行测度,估计并分析健康对贫困脆弱性的影响与内在机制.研究发现:居民健康水平的恶化会使其面临更高的贫困脆弱性,居民健康水平每下降10％,贫困脆弱性大约会上升6％;健康影响贫困脆弱性的作用机制中,物质资本和社会资本渠道被证明是相对有效的,而人力资本渠道尽管体现出微弱效应,但尚未在统计上得到显著性验证.因此,制订前瞻性的反贫政策应着眼于建立健康风险防范机制,包括提高农村医疗保障水平和重大疾病救助力度,并增加农村公共服务的投入,以促进其均衡化发展.     

Functional sliced inverse regression analysis

Most of the usual multivariate methods have been extended to the context of functional data analysis. Our contribution concerns the study of sliced inverse regression (SIR) when the response variable is real but the regressor is a function. In the first part, we show how the relevant properties of SIR remain essentially the same in the functional context under suitable conditions. Unfortunately, the estimation procedure used in the multivariate case cannot be directly transposed to the functional one. Then, we propose a solution that overcomes this difficulty and we show the consistency of the estimates of the parameters of the model.     

On proximity between PCA in the frequency domain and usual PCA

The principal components analysis (PCA) in the frequency domain of a stationary p-dimensional time series (X _n ) _n∈? leads to a summarizing time series written as a linear combination series X′ _n =∑ _m C _m ° X _n?m . Therefore, we observe that, when the coefficients C _m , m≠0, are close to 0, this PCA is close to the usual PCA, that is the PCA in the temporal domain. When the coefficients tend to 0, the corresponding limit is said to satisfy a property noted 𝒫, of which we will study the consequences. Finally, we will examine, for any series, the proximity between the two PCAs.     

On estimation and diagnostics analysis in log-generalized gamma regression model for interval-censored data

The interval-censored survival data appear very frequently, where the event of interest is not observed exactly but it is only known to occur within some time interval. In this paper, we propose a location-scale regression model based on the log-generalized gamma distribution for modelling interval-censored data. We shall be concerned only with parametric forms. The proposed model for interval-censored data represents a parametric family of models that has, as special submodels, other regression models which are broadly used in lifetime data analysis. Assuming interval-censored data, we consider a frequentist analysis, a Jackknife estimator and a non-parametric bootstrap for the model parameters. We derive the appropriate matrices for assessing local influence on the parameter estimates under different perturbation schemes and present some techniques to perform global influence.     

Kullback–Leibler information of a censored variable and its applications

In this paper, we study the Kullback–Leibler (KL) information of a censored variable, which we will simply call it censored KL information. The censored KL information is shown to have the necessary monotonicity property in addition to inherent properties of nonnegativity and characterization. We also present a representation of the censored KL information in terms of the relative risk and study its relation with the Fisher information in censored data. Finally, we evaluate the estimated censored KL information as a goodness-of-fit test statistic.