Education is considered an important means of alleviating poverty and of improving an individual’s job and earnings prospects. Nevertheless, in Haiti and the Dominican Republic school enrollment is far from complete and shows notable regional variation. This paper analyzes determinants of...

Because of its many advantages, the use of decision trees has become an increasingly popular alternative predictive tool for building classification and regression models. Its origins date back for about five decades where the algorithm can be broadly described by repeatedly partitioning the...

Granular spatial information on the distributions of human population is relevant to a variety of fields like health, economics, and other areas of public sector planning. This paper applies ensemble methods and aims at assessing their applicability to analyzing and forecasting population...

Poverty statistics are conventionally compiled using data from household income and expenditure survey or living standards survey. This study examines an alternative approach in estimating poverty by investigating whether readily available geospatial data can accurately predict the spatial...

The spatial granularity of poverty statistics can have a significant impact on the efficiency of targeting resources meant to improve the living conditions of the poor. However, achieving granularity typically requires increasing the sample sizes of surveys on household income and expenditure or...

Many multivariate methods that are apparently distinct can be linked by introducing one or more parameters in their definition. Methods that can be linked in this way are correspondence analysis, unweighted or weighted logratio analysis (the latter also known as quot;spectral mappingquot;),...

Without doubt modern education in statistics must involve practical, computer-based data analysis but the question arises whether and how computational elements should be integrated into the canon of methodological education. Should the student see and study high-level programming code right at...

Wavelet analysis, although used extensively in disciplines such as signal processing, engineering, medical sciences, physics and astronomy, has not yet fully entered the economics discipline. In this discussion paper, wavelet analysis is introduced in an intuitive manner, and the existing...

Statistical inference can be described as the process of drawing conclusions about a population or process based on sample data. This chapter outlines the logic of “classical” or “frequentist” methods for such inference. Three commonly used concepts for assessing statistical error are...

The singular value decomposition and its interpretation as a linear biplot has proved to be a powerful tool for analysing many forms of multivariate data. Here we adapt biplot methodology to the specific case of compositional data consisting of positive vectors each of which is constrained to...