Search results for " Finite Mixture Model"
showing 6 items of 6 documents
Finite Mixture Model-based classification of a complex vegetation system
2020
Aim: To propose a Finite Mixture Model (FMM) as an additional approach for classifying large datasets of georeferenced vegetation plots from complex vegetation systems. Study area: The Italian peninsula including the two main islands (Sicily and Sardinia), but excluding the Alps and the Po plain. Methods: We used a database of 5,593 georeferenced plots and 1,586 vascular species of forest vegetation, created in TURBOVEG by storing published and unpublished phytosociological plots collected over the last 30 years. The plots were classified according to species composition and environmental variables using a FMM. Classification results were compared with those obtained by TWINSPAN algorithm. …
The many faces of human sociality: uncovering the distribution and stability of social preferences
2018
There is vast heterogeneity in the human willingness to weigh others' interests in decision making. This heterogeneity concerns the motivational intricacies as well as the strength of other-regarding behaviors, and raises the question how one can parsimoniously model and characterize heterogeneity across several dimensions of social preferences while still being able to predict behavior over time and across situations. We tackle this task with an experiment and a structural model of preferences that allows us to simultaneously estimate outcome-based and reciprocity-based social preferences. We find that non-selfish preferences are the rule rather than the exception. Neither at the level of …
Reporting heterogeneity in health: an extended latent class approach
2012
This article explores how individual socio-economic characteristics affect unobserved heterogeneity in self-reporting behaviour and health production using a multivariate finite mixture model. Results show a positive relationship between objective and subjective observable health indicators and true health and support the existence of self-reporting bias related to socio-economic characteristics and individual life styles.
Evolution of the Global Distribution of Carbon Dioxide: A Finite Mixture Analysis
2015
Economists and environmental policymakers have recently begun advocating a bottom-up approach to climate change mitigation, focusing on reduction targets for groups of nations, rather than large scale global policies. We advance this discussion by taking a quantitative perspective, focusing on econometric identification of groups of countries that have statistically similar distributions of carbon emissions using a broad range of finite mixture models. Nearly all of our results yield a consistent pattern: after 1980, there are two distinct emissions distributions, and that these distributions continue to evolve over time. We provide a rigorous analysis of these distributional differences al…
Risk Preference Heterogeneity and Multiple Demand for Insurance
2010
We examined the relationship between unobserved risk preferences and four insurance purchase decisions: health Medigap insurance, long-term insurance, life insurance and annuity. Standard economic theory assumes that individuals take decision over a set of risky domains according to their own risk preferences which are stable across decision contexts. This assumption of context-invariant risk preference has caused debate in the literature concerning its validity. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, we exploit latent class analysis to identify conditional on predicted and realized risk how heterogeneity in risk preferences affects multiple insurance demand. Our results provide e…
Ranking Scientific Journals Via Latent Class Models for Polytomous Item Response Data
2015
Summary We propose a model-based strategy for ranking scientific journals starting from a set of observed bibliometric indicators that represent imperfect measures of the unobserved ‘value’ of a journal. After discretizing the available indicators, we estimate an extended latent class model for polytomous item response data and use the estimated model to cluster journals. We illustrate our approach by using the data from the Italian research evaluation exercise that was carried out for the period 2004–2010, focusing on the set of journals that are considered relevant for the subarea statistics and financial mathematics. Using four bibliometric indicators (IF, IF5, AIS and the h-index), some…