Community Amenity Measurement for the Great Fly-Over Zones

The purpose of this paper is to provide an alternative operationalization of amenities that does not privilege certain kinds of natural resources and climatic conditions and that can be used for assessing the quality of life in small towns. The amenity inventory presented here extends previous literature by including a broad range of amenities (natural resource, indoor and outdoor built recreational facilities, public and private services, and downtown amenities). The community level of analysis and small town focus are also unique. The inventory uses both secondary data from public sources and primary data that can be gathered by researchers or community residents. Therefore, in addition to the scholarly contribution of the inventory, the process of defining and assessing community amenities may be a valuable tool for building interpersonal relationships within communities, generating community spirit, and developing strategies for enhancing the local quality of life.     

Bayesian optimal blocking of factorial designs

The presence of block effects makes the optimal selection of fractional factorial designs a difficult task. The existing frequentist methods try to combine treatment and block wordlength patterns and apply minimum aberration criterion to find the optimal design. However, ambiguities exist in combining the two wordlength patterns and therefore, the optimality of such designs can be challenged. Here we propose a Bayesian approach to overcome this problem. The main technique is to postulate a model and a prior distribution to satisfy the common assumptions in blocking and then, to develop an optimal design criterion for the efficient estimation of treatment effects. We apply our method to develop regular, nonregular, and mixed-level blocked designs. Several examples are presented to illustrate the advantages of the proposed method.     

纳米级红外光谱用于聚合物的表征

尽管红外微光谱有广阔的用途,但是由于光学规则与实际设计的局限性,其基本的空间分辨率受到了限制。傅里叶变换红外光谱的空间分辨率局限于3倍的红外辐射波长。通过使用衰减全反射(ATR)的方式,可以将其空间分辨率接近于其辐射波长。纳米级红外光谱(Nano IR)技术可以解决分辨率的限制,提供一种在200nm及其之上可以测量样品物理和化学性质的方法。     

Regression with outlier shrinkage

We propose a robust regression method called regression with outlier shrinkage (ROS) for the traditional n>p$n>p$ cases. It improves over the other robust regression methods such as least trimmed squares (LTS) in the sense that it can achieve maximum breakdown value and full asymptotic efficiency simultaneously. Moreover, its computational complexity is no more than that of LTS. We also propose a sparse estimator, called sparse regression with outlier shrinkage (SROS), for robust variable selection and estimation. It is proven that SROS can not only give consistent selection but also estimate the nonzero coefficients with full asymptotic efficiency under the normal model. In addition, we introduce a concept of nearly regression equivariant estimator for understanding the breakdown properties of sparse estimators, and prove that SROS achieves the maximum breakdown value of nearly regression equivariant estimators. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate our methods.