Search results for "Finance"
showing 10 items of 4676 documents
A New Approach to Investigate Students’ Behavior by Using Cluster Analysis as an Unsupervised Methodology in the Field of Education
2016
The problem of taking a set of data and separating it into subgroups where the ele- ments of each subgroup are more similar to each other than they are to elements not in the subgroup has been extensively studied through the statistical method of cluster analysis. In this paper we want to discuss the application of this method to the field of education: particularly, we want to present the use of cluster analysis to separate students into groups that can be recognized and characterized by common traits in their answers to a questionnaire, without any prior knowledge of what form those groups would take (unsupervised classification). We start from a detailed study of the data processing need…
Review: Highlights in recent applications of electronic tongues in food analysis
2010
This paper examines the main features of modern electronic tongues (e-tongues) and their most important applications in food analysis in this new century. The components of an e-tongue (automatic sampler, array of chemical sensors, and data processing system) are described. Applications commented include process monitoring, freshness evaluation and shelf-life investigation, authenticity assessment, foodstuff recognition, quantitative analysis, and other quality control studies. Finally, some interesting remarks concerning the strengths and weaknesses of e-tongues in food analysis are also mentioned.
Hierarchically nested factor model from multivariate data
2005
We show how to achieve a statistical description of the hierarchical structure of a multivariate data set. Specifically we show that the similarity matrix resulting from a hierarchical clustering procedure is the correlation matrix of a factor model, the hierarchically nested factor model. In this model, factors are mutually independent and hierarchically organized. Finally, we use a bootstrap based procedure to reduce the number of factors in the model with the aim of retaining only those factors significantly robust with respect to the statistical uncertainty due to the finite length of data records.
The Model of Possible Web Data Retrieval
2015
In the Dempster-Shafer's theory of evidence, for incorporating uncertainty, the valuation assigns to the data tables the degrees of belief for these data. Firstly, we are looking for the answers to the following questions. Is there a valuation-based system in which combination and marginalization operate on valuations? Has this system prosperities analogical to the t-norm system? In the t-norm system of the valuation for the specific database attributes configuration can be described the algebra of possible data set in which can be interpreted the Information Retrieval Logic.
Differences in Life Expectancy Between Self-Employed Workers and Paid Employees when Retirement Pensioners: Evidence from Spanish Social Security Rec…
2021
The aim of this paper is to examine differences in life expectancy (LE) between self-employed (SE) and paid employee (PE) workers when they become retirement pensioners, looking at levels of pension income using administrative data from Spanish social security records. We draw on the Continuous Sample of Working Lives (CSWL) to quantify changes in total life expectancy at age 65 (LE(65)) among retired men over the longest possible period covered by this data source: 2005–2018. These changes are broken down by pension regime and initial pension income level for three periods. The literature presents mixed evidence, even for the same country–for Japan and Italy, for example–with some studies …
Presentation and analysis of an original database of the institutional characteristics of developing, in transition and developed countries
2004
The disparity between the development paths followed by the economies of a limited number of countries, known as ‘emerging’, and the bulk of the other developing countries has shown the limitations of previous development strategies. As a consequence, at the beginning of the 1990s, the question of institutions has been propelled to the top of the economic agenda. Theempirical literature has now solidly documented and validated the general relationship between institutions and development. With this as a starting point, attention is now being concentrated on the actual nature of theinstitutional mechanisms at work, the inter-relationships between them and their combined impact on development…
Transfer of powers and reallocation of the social capital available to junior governments
1993
The article starts from the assumption that the production of junior governments in sub-central jurisdictions such as the department of the region is related both to the powers or resources that they receive from the central government and to the social capital which is available to them. A model is proposed in which both elements are considered as factors o f production. The second being able to move only slowly across levels of jurisdiction, the central government is itself unable to transfer rapidly powers or resources from one level to another without running the risk of an efficiency loss of the whole which it would find unacceptable in terms of electoral support.
Decentralization as an incentive scheme when regional differences are large
2010
It has been suggested that large regional differences could be an obstacle to that part of the political accountability of office-holders which is based on yardstick competition among governments. The paper addresses that question and concludes that the obstacle is not too serious in general. The second part of the paper is devoted to the persistent economic underperformance of some regions in countries such as Germany, Italy and (with regard to regions overseas) France. How is it that the mechanism of yardstick competition induces a convergence of economic performance among European Union member countries, even those particularly poor initially, but fails to induce all the underperforming …
The foundations of decision theory: An intuitive, operational approach with mathematical extensions
1985
A new axiomatic basis for the foundations of decision theory is introduced and its mathematical development outlined. The system combines direct intuitive operational appeal with considerable structural flexibility in the resulting mathematical framework.
Global Cropland Yield Monitoring with Gaussian Processes
2021
Agriculture monitoring, and in particular food security, requires near real-time information on crop growing conditions for early detection of possible production deficits. In this work, we propose the use of Gaussian processes (GPs). together with in-situ, EO and ERA-Interim climate reanalysis data for crop yield forecasting. Country-level agricultural survey data from FAOSTAT are used for quantitative assessment. The study is conducted in the framework of the ASAP (Anomaly hot Spots of Agricultural Production) early warning decision support system of the European Commission, which aims at providing timely information about possible crop production anomalies worldwide. After grouping count…