On any given night in Victoria, around 4,000 children and young people live under the care and protection of the State. For many young people, this care extends over a long period of time, sometimes until their 18th birthday. It is well documented that young people leaving State care often lack...

The principle that the simplest model capable of describing observed phenomena should also correspond to the best description has long been a guiding rule of inference. In this paper a Bayesian approach to formally implementing this principle is employed to develop model selection criteria for...

This paper investigates the time caseworkers spend supporting long-term foster care and adoption placements. Undertaken in Australia through collaboration between university and nongovernment agency researchers, the 'Cost of Support Study' tracked the hours that caseworkers spent supporting...

A well known property of the Beveridge Nelson decomposition is that the innovations in the permanent and transitory components are perfectly correlated. We use a single source of error state space model to exploit this property and perform a Beveridge Nelson decomposition. The single source of...

Organizations with large-scale inventory systems typically have a large proportion of items for which demand is intermittent and low volume. We examine different approaches to forecasting for such products, paying particular attention to the need for inventory planning over a multi-period...

This paper is concerned with identifying an effective method for forecasting the lead time demand of slow-moving inventories. Particular emphasis is placed on prediction distributions instead of point predictions alone. It is also placed on methods which work with small samples as well as large...