Statistics

"This chapter discusses how models, combined with modern data sources and statistical methods, can be used to test different hypotheses about the causes of migration. Mathematical formalisms for migration are presented. The ecological mechanisms that could spontaneously have given rise to migration-like patterns of space use from the interaction within and between groups of animals and their environment are discussed, showing that migration is best seen as to lie on a continuum from sedentary to nomadic movement patterns and not as a clearly distinct movement behaviour. Given the multitude of potential processes leading to migration, and the constraints imposed by data collection methods, it may be difficult to observe and identify the original cause. With this caveat in mind, the use of inferential methods to detect, quantify and identify the underlying mechanisms of migration is discussed and the links between models, data and inference are illustrated using three case studies.
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Updates:
The book already sold out! A corrected reprint is available since Dec 2011."

The problem of prediction in functional linear regression is conventionally addressed by reducing dimension via the standard principal component basis. In this paper we show that an alternative basis chosen through weighted least-squares, or weighted least-squares itself, can be more effective when the experimental errors are heteroscedastic. We give a concise theoretical result which demonstrates the effectiveness of this approach, even when the model for the variance is inaccurate, and we explore the numerical properties of the method. We show too that the advantages of the suggested adaptive techniques are not found only in low-dimensional aspects of the problem; rather, they accrue almost equally among all dimensions.

We use a dynamical systems approach to model the origin of bargaining conventions and report the results of a symmetric bargaining game experiment. Our experiment also provides evidence on the psychological salience of symmetry and efficiency. The observed behavior in the experiment was systematic, replicable, and roughly consistent with the dynamical systems approach. For instance, we do observe unequal-division conventions emerging in colmnunities of sylnmetricaily endowed subjects.

Exponential smoothing (ES) forecasting methods are widely used but are often discussed without recourse to a formal statistical framework. This paper reviews and compares a variety of potential models for ES. As well as autoregressive integrated moving average and structural models, a promising class of dynamic non-linear state space models is described that allows for a changing variance. The richness of possible models helps to explain why ES methods seem to be robust in practice. A modelling approach can enhance the forecaster's ability to identify pertinent components of time series variation, and to obtain more reliable estimates of prediction error variances. The paper should be of particular interest to those engaged in forecasting applications where strategies that allow for risk and uncertainty are needed.

Design: B&T Ontwerp en advies www.b-en-t.nl Print: Haveka www.haveka.nl All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.

ABSTRACT In order to accelerate object evaluation, some measurement systems commonly use an ordinal scale (e.g., stick results, quality estimation). This paper presents a way to analyze ordinal data variation. As in classical ANOVA for continual data, ORDANOVA for ordinal data splits the total variation into within and between components. This decomposition has various practical applications such as classification, cluster analysis, distinguishing feature identification and so on.

Evidence-based decision-making in Abu Dhabi cultural sector is increasingly being influenced by the development of data generation from a coordinated statistical system. The Department of Culture and Tourism Abu Dhabi has increased its support of this focus by funding new research instruments, including CultureSTATS-AD project. One of the meth-odological challenges of CultureSTATS-AD project consists in articulation of the locally anchored and the internationally comparable dimensions of the evolving culture statistics system. The present paper addresses this methodological challenge by adopting a pragmatic approach to Abu Dhabi culture vocabulary. The practical usages of culture definitions by policymakers, academics and culture professionals replicate a myriad of underlying social processes. We suggest a transversal contextual analysis of Abu Dhabi culture documentation in order to understand in what conceptual, legal and social contexts each of the currently used culture definitions is inserted. Next, we propose to develop the culture indicators that emphasize these contexts. Finally, the paper offers methodological approaches to selection, definition and data population of culture indicators in Abu Dhabi. Even though our approach does not pretend to be exhaustive, it allows identifying the first linchpins of culture indicator building in Abu Dhabi and permits further alignment with the international standards.

Cette deuxième édition de Méthodes statistiques en sciences humaines a été produite dans le même esprit que la première. L’intention est à nouveau de présenter les outils statistiques dans une logique méthodologique et pratique, en les décrivant, en indiquant comment les utiliser avec le logiciel SPSS, en montrant comment interpréter les résultats que livre le logiciel et en proposant un exemple de la manière de rapporter ces résultats.
    Par rapport à la première, la principale différence de cette nouvelle édition est celle du recours à la version 26 du logiciel SPSS, ce qui modifie la manière dont les résultats sont disposés quand on compare avec les versions qui précèdent la 24e, la première édition ayant été développée avec une telle version du logiciel.
    Outre cet ajustement important, plusieurs corrections ont été apportées : des formules ont été révisées, des erreurs typographiques ont été supprimées, des descriptions ont été ajustées.
    Nous avons aussi augmenté le contenu. Pour le log-linéaire, par exemple, nous avons ajouté une illustration avec des variables qui comptent plus de deux modalités ; pour l’analyse de variance, nous avons discuté des conséquences d’un test de Levene qui s’avère significatif ; dans le cas des tests non paramétriques sur la comparaison, nous avons juxtaposé la façon traditionnelle de faire avec celle qu’offre en parallèle le logiciel, car ce que propose désormais SPSS sur ce plan mérite l’attention.

Cieľom predkladanej publikácie je napomôcť začínajúcim výskumníkom  v oblasti sociálneho výskumu zvládnuť náročný proces kvantitatívneho výskumu za použitia vlastného dotazníka. Má ambíciu stať sa akýmsi sprievodcom všetkými krokmi od úplného začiatku v prípravnej etape – voľby výskumnej témy, štúdia literatúry a dostupných zdrojov, konceptualizácie výskumného problému, tvorby projektu výskumu a jeho jednotlivých častí. Ďalej nasleduje operacionalizácia a v rámci nej rozklad sociálneho javu na premenné, formulácia výskumných otázok a hypotéz. Prvá časť publikácie je venovaná takisto popisu ďalších etáp výskumného procesu – výber výskumnej vzorky a samotná tvorba dotazníka.
Druhá časť publikácie je zameraná na prácu so štatistickým programom SPSS, ktorý je nápomocný pri spracovaní získaných dát. Hoci samotný program je užívateľsky príjemný, pre začínajúceho výskumníka môže byť veľmi užitočná akási názorná príručka na jeho používanie, o čo sme sa snažili. V častiach so štatistickými operáciami nebolo v žiadnom prípade našou ambíciou venovať sa štatistike do hĺbky – na to slúžia iné odborné zdroje. Našou ambíciou bolo, aby výskumník vedel v uvedenom programe dáta vložiť, posúdiť psychometrické vlastnosti  dotazníka, realizovať deskriptívnu analýzu a niektoré operácie v rámci induktívnej štatistiky (komparácia súborov, korelačná analýza, faktorová analýza, regresná analýza). V závere publikácie je uvedených niekoľko rád pri práci s programom SPSS, ktoré by mohli výskumníkovi prácu uľahčiť.       
Dúfame, že vyššie popísané ambície budú dosiahnuté a naša publikácia bude začínajúcemu výskumníkovi nápomocná.

Peirce's notions of diagrammatic reasoning and hypostatic abstraction are relevant to educational research in areas where diagrams and abstraction play an important role. In this paper, I analyze an example from statistics education in which diagrammatic reasoning created opportunities for hypostatic abstraction. For instance, where students initially characterized data points as being 'spread out,' they later said, 'the spread is large.' This is a prototypical example of hypostatic abstraction-taking a predicate as a new object that can have predicates itself. More generally, the notion of diagrammatic reasoning proved helpful to identify the key learning processes involved in learning to reason about statistical concepts.

This study aimed at evaluating the impact of commercial banks' credit to agricultural sector under the Agricultural Credit Guarantee Scheme Fund in Nigeria. Until the mid-seventies, agriculture was the primary foreign exchange earner for Nigeria. Now it has lost its prime position to the mineral sector. Of these factors, inadequate capital is considered as the single most important factor affecting the performance of the sector. It therefore empirically examined the impact of Agricultural Credit Guarantee Scheme Fund, agricultural product prices, government fund allocation and commercial banks' credit to agricultural sector on agricultural productivity. The result revealed that Agricultural Credit Guarantee Scheme Fund and Government fund allocation to agriculture produced a significant positive effect on agricultural productivity, while the other variables produced a significant negative effect. It is recommended that farmers should be encouraged to be applying for loans from the participating banks to enhance their agricultural activities and productivity.

In the last few years, several generators have been proposed to generate new distributions. Eugene et al. (2002) introduced the beta-generated family of distributions. By following the same logic, (Jones 2009) and Cordeiro and de Castro (2011) introduced the Kumaraswamy-generalized family of distributions. These two families have been extensively used to generate new distributions. The main purpose of this study is to collect and record all existing distributions that clearly belong to the families of beta-generated ‎and Kumaraswamy-generalized distributions.

O objetivo geral do Diagnóstico da Violência e Criminalidade do Município de
Itabuna é aprofundar a análise dos principais problemas de violência e criminalidade,
bem como a percepção da população sobre os mesmos, buscando identificar os
principais fatores de risco e oportunidades de solução dos problemas enfrentados e
mobilizar os atores governamentais e não-governamentais, facilitando assim a
implementação das estratégias de intervenção propostas pelo projeto. A sua
importância não está apenas na divulgação de dados estatísticos sobre a segurança
pública no município, mas na transformação desses dados estatísticos brutos em algo
que possa servir para orientar ações futuras.

The purpose of this handout is not to teach you how to design a research project. Rather it is to help you translate your research plans into an effective research proposal. A well-written proposal will ease the process of obtaining institutional and ethical approval and will increase your chances of obtaining funding for your project.

In their smash hit MATHEMATICAL STATISTICS WITH APPLICATIONS, debut creators Dennis Wackerly, William Mendenhall, and Richard L. Scheaffer present a strong establishment in factual hypothesis while passing on the pertinence and significance of the hypothesis in taking care of viable issues in reality. The creators' utilization of pragmatic applications and fantastic activities encourages you find the idea of insights and comprehend its basic job in logical research.

The increasing wind power generation requires the updating of the computational tools that support decision making in the operation and planning of electric power systems. This work describes a methodology to model the spatial correlations among wind speeds probability distributions in probabilistic power flow. The proposed methodology is based on Nataf transformation and Monte Carlo Simulation. The proposed methodology is illustrated in case studies with the IEEE 24 bus test system, highlighting the importance of adequately considering such correlations.

In probabilistic slope stability analysis, the influence of cross correlation of the soil strength parameters, cohesion and internal friction angle, on the reliability index has not been investigated fully. In this paper, an expedient technique is presented for probabilistic slope stability analysis that involves sampling a series of combinations of soil strength parameters through a copula as input to an existing conventional deterministic slope stability program. The approach organises the individual marginal probability density distributions of componential shear strength as a bivariate joint distribution by the copula function to characterise the dependence between shear strengths. The technique can be used to generate an arbitrarily large sample of soil strength parameters. Examples are provided to illustrate the use of the copula-based sampling method to estimate the reliability index of given slopes, and the computed results are compared with the first-order reliability method, considering the correlated random variables. A sensitivity study was conducted to assess the influence of correlational measurements on the reliability index. The approach is simple and can be applied in practice with little effort beyond what is necessary in a conventional analysis.

Bricks are one of the most important items of construction activities. India is the second largest brick producer in the world. It is continuously expanding on account of a rapid increase in demand for bricks in infrastructure and housing project. In order to meet this demand, over 150,000 brick units provide direct employment to more than 8 million workers. The annual turnover of the industry is Rs. 8000 crore (Approx). With the restriction in use of clay in manufacturing of bricks, fly ash brick is best substitute for it. Growing awareness among the prospective and potential building & consistent efforts by Govt. fly ash brick is incorporate in the schedule of various construction agencies. With the change of demand of the society, fly ash bricks are gradually increasing day by day not only in the metropolitan cities but also in urban & rural sector. All construction works are dependent on bricks. This research paper presents a comparison of fly ash bricks and clay bricks. Data is collected through questionnaires and personal interviews targeting Consultants, Engineers, and Traders. SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) is adopted to evaluate the responses collected from the respondent by Independent Samples T-test.