Researchers are increasingly able to capture spatially referenced data on both a response and a covariate more frequently and in more detail. A combination of geostatisical models and analysis of covariance methods may be used to analyze such data. However, very basic questions regarding the...

The current study presents a statistical model for assessing the skill of fire danger indices and for forecasting the distribution of the expected numbers of large fires over a given region and for the upcoming week. The procedure permits development of daily maps that forecast, for the...

The impact of livestock grazing on water quality, especially erosion and sedimentation, is an important concern in the southwestern United States. In response to Federal and State regulations, Best Management Practices (BMPs) for rangeland management are being developed and implemented in many...

National forest inventory programs are tasked to produce timely and accurate estimates for a wide range of forest resource variables for a variety of users and applications. Time, cost, and precision constraints cause these programs to seek technological innovations that contribute to...

Decision support systems (DSS), also known as forest resource information systems, focus on providing forest managers information to make better decisions. DSS in forestry organizations have evolved from the integration of geographic information systems and database management systems with...

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an internationally standardized assessment to 15-year-old pupils in schools. With the same purpose, the questionnaire made by Dr. Duller (Austria) was conducted at the university Humboldt, Berlin. We would like to assess how good...

In this brief, we propose a fast expectation conditional maximization (ECM) algorithm for maximum-likelihood (ML) estimation of mixtures of factor analyzers (MFA). Unlike the existing expectation-maximization (EM) algorithms such as the EM in Ghahramani and Hinton, 1996, and the alternating ECM...

Although the Bock–Aitkin likelihood-based estimation method for factor analysis of dichotomous item response data has important advantages over classical analysis of item tetrachoric correlations, a serious limitation of the method is its reliance on fixed-point Gauss-Hermite (G-H) quadrature...

Although the Bock–Aitkin likelihood-based estimation method for factor analysis of dichotomous item response data has important advantages over classical analysis of item tetrachoric correlations, a serious limitation of the method is its reliance on fixed-point Gauss-Hermite (G-H) quadrature...