A note on estimating the common mean of k normal distributions and the stein problem

An unbiased estimator for the common mean of k normal distributions is suggested. A necessary and sufficient condition for the estimator Lo have a smaller variance than each sample mean is given. In the case of estimating the common mean vector of k p-variate (p ≤ 3) normal distributions a combined unbiased estimator may be used. We give a class of estimators which are better than the combined estimator when the loss is quadratic and the restriction of unbiasedness is removed.     

Bias of maximum likelihood estimators of the response standard deviation in regression

The bias of maximum likelihood estimators of the standard deviation of the response in location/scale regression models is considered. Results are obtained for a very wide family of densities for the response variable. These are used to propose point estimators with improved mean square error properties and to demonstrate the importance of bias correction in statistical inference when samples are moderately small.     

Inference for the common mean of several Birnbaum–Saunders populations

The Birnbaum–Saunders distribution is a widely used distribution in reliability applications to model failure times. For several samples from possible different Birnbaum–Saunders distributions, if their means can be considered as the same, it is of importance to make inference for the common mean. This paper presents procedures for interval estimation and hypothesis testing for the common mean of several Birnbaum–Saunders populations. The proposed approaches are hybrids between the generalized inference method and the large sample theory. Some simulation results are conducted to present the performance of the proposed approaches. The simulation results indicate that our proposed approaches perform well. Finally, the proposed approaches are applied to analyze a real example on the fatigue life of 6061-T6 aluminum coupons for illustration.     

Application of copulas to multivariate control charts

The most popular multivariate control chart for monitoring the mean of a distribution is probably the Hotelling T² rule. Unfortunately, this rule relies on the assumption that the distribution under control is Gaussian, which is rarely true in practice. The objective of this paper is to propose a new approach for the non-normal multivariate case. It consists in the construction of a tolerance region obtained from a density level set estimation. The method follows a “plug-in” approach in which the density of the observations is previously estimated. This estimation is conducted using copulas modeling, an increasingly popular tool in multivariate modeling.     

Macroeconomic Forecasting Using Pooled International Data

The genetic algorithm is examined as a method for solving optimization problems in econometric estimation. It does not restrict either the form or regularity of the objective function, allows a reasonably large parameter space, and does not rely on a point-to-point search. The performance is evaluated through two sets of experiments on standard test problems as well as econometric problems from the literature. First, alternative genetic algorithms that vary over mutation and crossover rates, population sizes, and other features are contrasted. Second, the genetic algorithm is compared to Nelder–Mead simplex, simulated annealing, adaptive random search, and MSCORE.     

A testing approach to estimation

Results from the theory of uniformly most powerful invariant tests are used to develop a new parameter estimation procedure. The procedure is used to derive parameter estimators for several important distributions. Results of simulation studies comparing the performances of the new estimators and maximum likelihood estimators are presented.     

Efficient sequential estimation in a markov branching process with immigration

Sequential estimation of parameters In a continuous time Markov branching process with Immigration with split rate λ₁ Immigration rate λ₂, offspring distribution {p₁j≥O) and Immigration distribution {p₂j≥l} is considered. A sequential version of the Cramér-Rao type information inequality is derived which gives a lower bound on the variances of unbiased estimators for any function of these parameters. Attaining the lower bounds depends on whether the sampling plan or stopping rule S, the estimator f, and the parametric function g = E(f) are efficient. All efficient triples (S,f,g) are characterized; It Is shown that for i = 1,2, only linear combinations of λ_ip_{ij j}'s or their ratios are efficiently estimable. Applications to a Yule process, a linear birth and death process with immigration and an M/M/∞ queue are also considered     

Improved point and confidence interval estimators of mean response in simulation when control variates are used

In discrete event simulation, the method of control variates is often used to reduce the variance of estimation for the mean of the output response. In the present paper, it is shown that when three or more control variates are used, the usual linear regression estimator of the mean response is one of a large class of unbiased estimators, many of which have smaller variance than the usual estimator. In simulation studies using control variates, a confidence interval for the mean response is typically reported as well. Intervals with shorter width have been proposed using control variates in the literature. The present paper however develops confidence intervals which not only have shorter width but also have higher coverage probability than the usual confidence interval     

Estimation of the scale parameter after a pre-test for homogeneity in a mis-specified regression model

The risk properties of estimators of the scale parameter after a pre-test for homogeneity of the error variances in the two sample linear regression model has received quite an amount of attention in the literature. This literature typically assumes normal disturbances and a properly specified model. In this paper we consider that both equations may be mis-specified by the omission of relevant regressors and that the error distributions may belong to a wider class than the normal distribution. We derive and analyse the exact risk (under quadratic loss) of the pre-test estimator of the scale parameter for the first sub-sample.     

Second-derivative functional regression with applications to near infra-red spectroscopy

A linear regression method to predict a scalar from a discretized smooth function is presented. The method takes into account the functional nature of the predictors and the importance of the second derivative in spectroscopic applications. This motivates a functional inner product that can be used as a roughness penalty. Using this inner product, we derive a linear prediction method that is similar to ridge regression but with different shrinkage characteristics. We describe its practical implementation and we address the problem of computing the second derivatives nonparametrically. We apply the method to a calibration example using near infra-red spectra. We conclude with a discussion comparing our approach with other regression algorithms.