0000000000135617
AUTHOR
Gianna Agrò
A Multisite-Multipollutant Air Quality Index
Abstract In this paper, starting from a multivariate spatio-temporal array, containing air pollution data collected for the main pollutants at different monitoring sites over a 1-year period, a new approach is proposed to get a Multipollutant-Multisite Air Quality Index (AQI) time series. A two steps aggregation, related to space and to pollutants, is considered. For the first aggregation (spatial synthesis) a PCA is performed on data array opportunely rearranged, while the index I2, proposed in Ruggieri and Plaia (2011) , is used for the second aggregation (pollutant synthesis), obtaining the new index I 2 MS . Daily data of four air pollutants from the city of Palermo (Italy) are analyzed…
Influence of a Specific Aquatic Program on Social and Gross Motor Skills in Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders: Three Case Reports
Swimming pool activities revealed to be efficacious to train psychomotor skills and increase adaptive behaviors in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate the efficacy of a specific multi-systemic aquatic therapy (CI-MAT) on gross motor and social skills in three adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Methods: three adolescents with ASD of which two boys (M1 with a chronological age of 10.3 years and a mental age of 4.7 years; M2 with a chronological age of 14.6 and a mental age inferior to 4 years) and one girl (chronological age of 14.0 and a mental age inferior to 4 years). The study was divided into three phases: …
The interrelation between socio-spatial and institutional context and family business characteristics
Tomaselli, Agrò, Fazio e Fricano show how family firms draw strength from the regional institutional context (where the region is properly intended as an administrative sub-unit at national level), as well as contribute to its evolution via their own actions. The variation in family competencies and internal dynamics lead to differences in family firms's overlla performance. The relationship with the regional institutional system in mutually sinergic - even marginal family businesses add their voice to whole, resulting in grater collective political influence, and at the same time the institutions at the regional level provide some degree of legitimacy to all players.
The Duality of Entropy/Extropy, and Completion of the Kullback Information Complex
The refinement axiom for entropy has been provocative in providing foundations of information theory, recognised as thoughtworthy in the writings of both Shannon and Jaynes. A resolution to their concerns has been provided recently by the discovery that the entropy measure of a probability distribution has a dual measure, a complementary companion designated as &ldquo
Functional Principal Component Analysis for the explorative analysis of multisite-multivariate air pollution time series with long gaps
The knowledge of the urban air quality represents the first step to face air pollution issues. For the last decades many cities can rely on a network of monitoring stations recording concentration values for the main pollutants. This paper focuses on functional principal component analysis (FPCA) to investigate multiple pollutant datasets measured over time at multiple sites within a given urban area. Our purpose is to extend what has been proposed in the literature to data that are multisite and multivariate at the same time. The approach results to be effective to highlight some relevant statistical features of the time series, giving the opportunity to identify significant pollutants and…
Completing the logarithmic scoring rule for assessing probability distributions
We propose and motivate an expanded version of the logarithmic score for forecasting distributions, termed the Total Log score. It incorporates the usual logarithmic score, which is recognised as incomplete and has been mistakenly associated with the likelihood principle. The expectation of the Total Log score equals the Negentropy plus the Negextropy of the distribution. We examine both discrete and continuous forms of the scoring rule, and we discuss issues of scaling for scoring assessments. The analysis suggests the dual tracking of the quadratic score along with the usual log score when assessing the qualities of probability distributions. An application to the sequential scoring of f…
Influence of a specific aquatic adapted physical activity in a child with Autism Spectrum Disorders: A case study
Aquatic environment offers an exciting and motivating place for children and aquatic exercise programs provide an appropriate setting for early educational interventions in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a specific Multi-systemic Aquatic Therapy (CI-MAT) on gross motor and adaptive skills in a child with ASD. The study was divided into three phases: baseline, 12-week CI-MAT program and Post-Test. Child was administered a battery of tests incorporating anthropometric measurements, gross motor development test (TGM test), Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales (VABS) and Psychoeducational Profile (PEP-3) before and after a …
Sequentially Forecasting Economic Indices Using Mixture Linear Combinations of EP Distributions
This article displays an application of the statistical method moti- vated by Bruno de Finetti's operational subjective theory of probability. We use exchangeable forecasting distributions based on mixtures of linear com- binations of exponential power (EP) distributions to forecast the sequence of daily rates of return from the Dow-Jones index of stock prices over a 20 year period. The operational subjective statistical method for comparing distributions is quite different from that commonly used in data analysis, because it rejects the basic tenets underlying the practice of hypothesis test- ing. In its place, proper scoring rules for forecast distributions are used to assess the values o…
Empirical Orthogonal Function and Functional Data Analysis Procedures to Impute Long Gaps in Environmental Data
Air pollution data sets are usually spatio-temporal multivariate data related to time series of different pollutants recorded by a monitoring network. To improve the estimate of functional data when missing values, and mainly long gaps, are present in the original data set, some procedures are here proposed considering jointly Functional Data Analysis and Empirical Orthogonal Function approaches. In order to compare and validate the proposed procedures, a simulation plan is carried out and some performance indicators are computed. The obtained results show that one of the proposed procedures works better than the others, providing a better reconstruction especially in presence of long gaps.
Extropy: Complementary Dual of Entropy
This article provides a completion to theories of information based on entropy, resolving a longstanding question in its axiomatization as proposed by Shannon and pursued by Jaynes. We show that Shannon's entropy function has a complementary dual function which we call "extropy." The entropy and the extropy of a binary distribution are identical. However, the measure bifurcates into a pair of distinct measures for any quantity that is not merely an event indicator. As with entropy, the maximum extropy distribution is also the uniform distribution, and both measures are invariant with respect to permutations of their mass functions. However, they behave quite differently in their assessments…