A Markov Chain Monte Carlo method is proposed for the pointwise evaluation of a density whose normalizing constant is not known. This method was introduced in the physics literature by Assaraf et al (2007). Conditions for unbiasedness of the estimator are derived. A central limit theorem is also...

Within our research group Bayesian Risk Solutions we have coined the idea of a Bayesian Risk Management (BRM). It claims (1) a more transparent and diligent data analysis as well as (2)an open-minded incorporation of human expertise in risk management. In this dissertation we formulize a...

The measurement of health inequalities usually involves either estimating the concentration of health outcomes using an income-based measure of status or applying conventional inequality-measurement tools to a health variable that is non-continuous or, in many cases, categorical. However, these...

Do financial market analysts use structural economic models when forecasting exchange rates? This is the leading question analysed in this paper. In contrast to other studies we use expectations data instead of observable variables. Therefore we analyse the implicit structural models forecasters...

In practice, the dataset collected from data mining usually contains some missing values. It is common practice to perform case deletion by ignoring those data with missing values if the missing rate is certainly small. The aim of this paper is to answer the following question: When should one...

Much of the theoretical literature on inequality assumes that the equalisand is a cardinal variable like income or wealth. However, health status is generally measured as a categorical variable expressing a qualitative order. Traditional solutions involve reclassifying the variable by means of...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the performance of different approaches in analyzing multigroup multidimensional binary data under different conditions. Two multidimensional Item Response Theory (MIRT) methods (concurrent MIRT calibration and separate MIRT calibration with linking)...

Approaches to measuring health inequalities are often problematic in that they use methods that are inappropriate for categorical data. The approach here focuses on "pure" or univariate health inequality (rather than income-related or bivariate health inequality) and is based on a concept of...