Precise Simulated Percentiles in a Pinch

A percentile point simulation algorithm is presented. The algorithm is useful when computer storage and time considerations are at a premium. The algorithm employs various time- and storage-saving ideas, including a “pinching” mechanism that reduces the proportion of simulated values stored as the number of iterations is increased. Algorithm output includes a measure of precision as well as the simulated percentile point. The simulation can be stopped when the desired degree of precision has been attained.     

Statisticians Can Matter

Statisticians fall far short of their potential as guides to enlightened decision making in business. Two important explanations are: (1) Decision makers are often more easily convinced by concrete examples, however fragmentary and misleading, than by competent statistical analysis. (2) The effective use of statistics in the process of decision making requires hard thinking by decision makers, thinking that cannot be delegated entirely to the statistical specialist. Modern developments in interactive statistical computing may help to reduce the force of these limitations on exploitation of statistics; used properly, computing can encourage, almost force, the student or business user of statistics to think statistically.     

Bill Cochran: His Contributions to Medicine and Public Health and Some Personal Recollections

There is a tremendous need in our technological society to train statisticians for all sectors of education, government, and industry. Because statistical training has largely been restricted to graduate schools, the profession is losing many good students to other fields of study. Members of the statistics community are encouraged to reach out to high-school students and undergraduate students to increase the awareness of statistics as a scientific field of study and as a professional career. The ASA Council of Chapters has recently completed a slide presentation entitled “Statistical Science: The Profession,” which was professionally developed to aid this endeavor. In addition, high-school teachers, high-school counselors, and professors of mathematics and science education are identified as important audiences for hearing this message and for broadening general public awareness of what our profession has to offer.     

Distributing Journals to the World

Abstract

In 2001, a number of initiatives began for distributing research journals to parts of the world where they are otherwise not accessible. This “Balance Point” reports on two publishers whose journals are now more broadly available in developing nations. HighWire Press offers both a free back issue archive and a developing countries initiative. Blackwell Publishing is working with a Russian consortium to make journals available to Russian universities and with nongovernmental organizations to provide free or nearly free access to biomedical journals in a number of developing nations. Serials Review 2002; 28:113–115.     

Simulation of Balakrishnan skew-normal order statistics

ABSTRACT

The novel Balakrishnan skew-normal distribution introduced in 2008 has received considerable interest. Here, we derive stochastic representations for simulating order statistics of the novel Balakrishnan skew-normal distribution. The resulting algorithms are more efficient than the ordinary sorting algorithm.     

Enrolment in initial courses in statistics: An exploratory study

In January 1981 a questionnaire was sent to 102 universities and colleges in Canada and the United States seeking information on enrolment in initial courses in statistics. That questionnaire has been analyzed and the results are presented in this paper.     

《醒世恒言》被动句式考察

对《醒世恒言》中的被动句式进行分类统计,从用量及结构等方面探讨“于”字式、“见”字式、“为”字式和“为……所”式这些上古汉语传统模式的衰微、“被”字式在近代汉语中的进一步发展以及“教”字式、“与”字式、“吃”字式这些近代汉语才产生的被动式的特点,从而阐述被动句式在近代汉语中的发展概貌。     

统计学发展过程中四次重要的争论及其影响

统计学发展过程中出现过几次重大的争论,这些争论在本质上可以说是一脉相承的。"政治算术"与"国势学"的争论,明确了统计学的学科性质;"描述统计学"与"推断统计学"的争论,构筑了统计学的完整体系;"经典统计学"与"贝叶斯统计学"的争论,带来了统计哲学观的新变化;信念统计学与经典统计学、贝叶斯统计学的争论,使统计推断科学化问题的研究日趋深入。正是通过这些争论完善了现代统计学的思想和方法体系。     

Information preserving statistical obfuscation

The problem of limiting the disclosure of information gathered on a set of companies or individuals (the respondents) is considered, the aim being to provide useful information while preserving confidentiality of sensitive information. The paper proposes a method which explicitly preserves certain information contained in the data. The data are assumed to consist of two sets of information on each respondent: public data and specific survey data. It is assumed in this paper that both sets of data are liable to be released for a subset of respondents. However, the public data will be altered in some way to preserve confidentiality whereas the specific survey data is to be disclosed without alteration. The paper proposes a model based approach to this problem by utilizing the information contained in the sufficient statistics obtained from fitting a model to the public data by conditioning on the survey data. Deterministic and stochastic variants of the method are considered.     

Estimation under modified Weibull distribution based on right censored generalized order statistics

In this paper, the maximum likelihood (ML) and Bayes, by using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), methods are considered to estimate the parameters of three-parameter modified Weibull distribution (MWD(β, τ, λ)) based on a right censored sample of generalized order statistics (gos). Simulation experiments are conducted to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed methods. Some comparisons are carried out between the ML and Bayes methods by computing the mean squared errors (MSEs), Akaike's information criteria (AIC) and Bayesian information criteria (BIC) of the estimates to illustrate the paper. Three real data sets from Weibull(α, β) distribution are introduced and analyzed using the MWD(β, τ, λ) and also using the Weibull(α, β) distribution. A comparison is carried out between the mentioned models based on the corresponding Kolmogorov–Smirnov (K–S) test statistic, {AIC and BIC} to emphasize that the MWD(β, τ, λ) fits the data better than the other distribution. All parameters are estimated based on type-II censored sample, censored upper record values and progressively type-II censored sample which are generated from the real data sets.