P(enalized)-splines and fractional polynomials (FPs) have emerged as powerful smoothing techniques with increasing popularity in several fields of applied research. Both approaches provide considerable flexibility, but only limited comparative evaluations of the performance and properties of the...

Models with structured additive predictor provide a very broad and rich framework for complex regression modeling. They can deal simultaneously with nonlinear covariate effects and time trends, unit- or cluster-specific heterogeneity, spatial heterogeneity and complex interactions between...

Structured additive regression (STAR) models provide a flexible framework for modeling possible nonlinear effects of covariates: They contain the well established frameworks of generalized linear models (GLM) and generalized additive models (GAM) as special cases but also allow a wider class of...

Models with structured additive predictor provide a very broad and rich framework for complex regression modeling. They can deal simultaneously with nonlinear covariate effects and time trends, unit- or cluster specific heterogeneity, spatial heterogeneity and complex interactions between...

This paper analyzes house price data belonging to three hierarchical levels of spatial units. House selling prices with associated individual attributes (the elementary level-1) are grouped within municipalities (level-2), which form districts (level-3), which are themselves nested in counties...

P(enalized)-splines and fractional polynomials (FPs) have emerged as powerful smoothing techniques with increasing popularity in applied research. Both approaches provide considerable flexibility, but only limited comparative evaluations of the performance and properties of the two methods have...

The Basel II framework strictly defines the conditions under which financial institutions are authorized to accept real estate as collateral in order to decrease their credit risk. A widely used concept for its valuation is the hedonic approach. It assumes, that a property can be characterized...

We consider a system with hysteresis: the motion of a particle is governed by one of two stochastic differential equations depending on which of two thresholds 0 and x1,x1 0 was crossed last. Using observations of the process over a fixed time interval we construct the maximum likelihood...

It is popular belief that the weather is "bad" more frequently on weekends than on other days of the week and this is often perceived to be associated with an increased chance of rain. In fact, the meteorological literature does report some evidence for such human-induced weekly cycles although...

The capabilities of the package exams for automatic generation of (statistical) exams in R are extended by adding support for learning management systems: As in earlier versions of the package exam generation is still based on separate Sweave files for each exercise - but rather than just...