Search results for " smoothing"

Prudential supervisors' independence and income smoothing in European banks

2019

[EN] We investigate the role of prudential supervisors' independence in affecting income smoothing behavior in European banks. Powerful national supervisors are predicted to influence the accounting practices of their supervised entities, shaping the properties of the accounting numbers they prepare. In particular, we study whether greater independence of powerful supervisors from the government and from the industry is associated with lower income smoothing. We use the mandatory adoption of a single set of accounting standards in Europe as a shock to the influence of prudential supervisors over national banks' accounting practice. Our results confirm that political and industry independenc…

Hand Held 3D Scanning for Cultural Heritage: Experimenting Low Cost Structure Sensor Scan

2017

In the last years 3D scanning has become an important resource in many fields, in particular it has played a key role in study and preservation of Cultural Heritage. Moreover today, thanks to the miniaturization of electronic components, it has been possible produce a new category of 3D scanners, also known as handheld scanners. Handheld scanners combine a relatively low cost with the advantage of the portability. The aim of this chapter is two-fold: first, a survey about the most recent 3D handheld scanners is presented. As second, a study about the possibility to employ the handheld scanners in the field of Cultural Heritage is conducted. In this investigation, a doorway of the Benedictin…

Enhancing TIR Image Resolution via Bayesian Smoothing for IRRISAT Irrigation Management Project

2013

Accurate estimation of physical quantities depends on the availability of High Resolution (HR) observations of the Earth surface. However, due to the unavoidable tradeoff between spatial and time resolution, the acquisition instants of HR data hardly coincides with those required by the estimation algorithms. A possible solution consists in constructing a synthetic HR observation at a given time k by exploiting Low Resolution (LR) and HR data acquired at different instants. In this work we recast this issue as a smoothing problem, thus focusing on cases in which observations acquired both before and after time k are available. The proposed approach is validated on a region of interest for t…

Exponential smoothing with covariates applied to electricity demand forecast

2013

Exponential smoothing methods are widely used as forecasting techniques in industry and business. Their usual formulation, however, does not allow covariates to be used for introducing extra information into the forecasting process. In this paper, we analyse an extension of the exponential smoothing formulation that allows the use of covariates and the joint estimation of all the unknowns in the model, which improves the forecasting results. The whole procedure is detailed with a real example on forecasting the daily demand for electricity in Spain. The time series of daily electricity demand contains two seasonal patterns: here the within-week seasonal cycle is modelled as usual in exponen…

Bayesian forecasting of demand time-series data with zero values

2013

This paper describes the development of a Bayesian procedure to analyse and forecast positive demand time-series data with a proportion of zero values and a high level of variability for the non-zero data. The resulting forecasts play decisive roles in organisational planning, budgeting, and performance monitoring. Exponential smoothing methods are widely used as forecasting techniques in industry and business. However, they can be unsuitable for the analysis of non-negative demand time-series data with the aforementioned features. In this paper, an unconstrained latent demand underlying the observed demand is introduced into the linear heteroscedastic model associated with the Holt-Winters…

A robust blind 3-D mesh watermarking based on wavelet transform for copyright protection

2019

Nowadays, three-dimensional meshes have been extensively used in several applications such as, industrial, medical, computer-aided design (CAD) and entertainment due to the processing capability improvement of computers and the development of the network infrastructure. Unfortunately, like digital images and videos, 3-D meshes can be easily modified, duplicated and redistributed by unauthorized users. Digital watermarking came up while trying to solve this problem. In this paper, we propose a blind robust watermarking scheme for three-dimensional semiregular meshes for Copyright protection. The watermark is embedded by modifying the norm of the wavelet coefficient vectors associated with th…

Spatial analysis of the relationship between mortality from cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease and drinking water hardness

2004

Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't; Reproduced with permission from Environmental Health Perspectives. Previously published scientific papers have reported a negative correlation between drinking water hardness and cardiovascular mortality. Some ecologic and case-control studies suggest the protective effect of calcium and magnesium concentration in drinking water. In this article we present an analysis of this protective relationship in 538 municipalities of Comunidad Valenciana (Spain) from 1991-1998. We used the Spanish version of the Rapid Inquiry Facility (RIF) developed under the European Environment and Health Information System (EUROHEIS) research project. The strateg…

An interpolation-based data fusion scheme for enhancing the resolution of thermal image sequences

2014

In several human activities, such as agriculture and forest management, the monitoring of radiometric surface temperature is key. In particular both high spatial resolution and high acquisition rate are desirable but, due to the hardware limitations, these two characteristics are not met by the same sensor. The fusion of remotely sensed data acquired by sensors with different spatial and temporal resolution is a profitable choice to face this issue. When the real-time requirement is relaxed, the data sequence can be processed as a whole, allowing to improve the final result. Within this framework, we propose a novel batch sharpening strategy, relying on interpolation, data fusion and Bayesi…

When Aiyagari meets Piketty: Growth, Inequality and Capital Shares

2021

We incorporate the division of income between capital and labor into analysis on the relationship between inequality and growth. Using historical data, we document that changes in the top 1 % income shares are positively associated with subsequent growth of per capita GDP when the capital share of income is low, whereas under high capital share, the association is negative. We show that these findings are compatible with a theoretical analysis that emphasises how changes in the distribution of income translate into the accumulation of capital and overall economic activity through the interplay between precautionary saving motives and consumption smoothing. We also investigate how accounting…

Induced smoothing in LASSO regression

The thesis is being carried out with the National research Council at the Institute of Biomedicine and Molecular Immunology "Alberto Monroy" of Palermo, where I am a fellow, under the supervision of MD Stefania La Grutta. Our research unit is focused on clinical research in allergic respiratory problems in children. In particular, we are interested in to assess the determinants of impaired lung function in a sample of outpatient asthmatic children aged between 5 and 17 years enrolled from 2011 to 2017. Our dataset is composed by n = 529 children and several covariates regarding host and environmental factors. This thesis focuses on hypothesis testing in lasso regression, when one is interes…