The current kidney allocation system in the United States fails to match donors and recipients well. In an effort to improve the allocation system, the United Network of Organ Sharing (UNOS) defined factors that should determine a new allocation policy, and particularly patients' potential...

The main goal of biosurveillance is the early detection of disease outbreaks. Advances in technology have allowed the collection, transfer, and storage of pre-diagnostic information in addition to traditional diagnostic data. Such data carry the potential of an earlier outbreak signature. In...

Creating a loyal customer base is one of the most important, and at the same time, most difficult tasks a company faces. Creating loyalty online (e-loyalty) is especially difficult since customers can "switch" to a competitor with the click of a mouse. In this paper we investigate e-loyalty in...

Poisson regression is a popular tool for modeling count data and is applied in a vast array of applications from the social to the physical sciences and beyond. Real data, however, are often over- or under-dispersed and, thus, not conducive to Poisson regression. We propose a regression model...

The most popular method for modeling count data is Poisson regression. When data display over-dispersion, thereby deeming Poisson regression inadequate, typically negative-binomial regression is instead used. We show that count data that appear to be equi-dispersed or over-dispersed may actually...

We define the concept of Information Quality (InfoQ) as the potential of a dataset to achieve a specific (scientific or practical) goal using a given empirical analysis method. InfoQ is different from data quality and analysis quality, but is dependent on these components and on the relationship...

Electronic commerce, and in particular online auctions, have received an extreme surge of popularity in recent years. While auction theory has been studied for a long time from a game-theory perspective, the electronic implementation of the auction mechanism poses new and challenging research...

This research uses functional data modelling to study the price formation process of online auctions. It conceptualizes the price curve and its first and second derivatives(velocity and acceleration respectively) as the primary objects of interest. Together these three functional objects permit...

Current biosurveillance relies on classical statistical control charts for detecting disease out-breaks. However, these are not always suitable in this context. Assumptions of normality, independence, and stationarity are typically violated in syndromic data. Furthermore, outbreak signatures in...

Censored count data are encountered in many applications, often due to a data collection mechanism that introduces censoring. A common example is questionnaires with question answers of the type 0,1,2,3. We consider the problem of predicting a censored output variable Y, given a set of complete...