When a country experiences a balance of payments problem, the typical remedy mix proposed by the International Monetary Fund consists of fiscal austerity, tight monetary policies, devaluation, privatization, elimination of subsidies and trade liberalization, combined with low interest rate...

We study the asymptotic properties of the logrankand stratified logrank tests under different types of assumptionsregarding the dependence of the censoring and the survival times.When the treatment group and the covariates are conditionallyindependent given that the subject is still at risk, the...

Sample weight calibration, also referred to as calibration estimation, is a widely applied technique in the analysis of survey data. This method borrows strength from a set of auxiliary variables and can produce weighted estimates with smaller mean square errors than those estimators that do not...

Heterogeneity in measurement model parameters across known groups can be modeled and tested using multigroup confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). When it is not reasonable to assume that parameters are homogeneous for all observations in a manifest group, mixture CFA models are appropriate....

Probabilistic graphical models, by making conditional independence assumptions, can represent complex joint distributions in a factorized form. However, in large problems graphical models often run into two issues. First, in non-treelike graphs, computational issues frustrate exact inference....

In the study of finance, likelihood based or moment based methods are frequently used to estimate parameters for various kinds of models given the sampled return data. While the former method is not robust, the latter one suffers from loss of efficiency and high noise-to-signal ratio in the...

Measuring continuous change or growth in individual students' academic abilities over time currently uses several statistical models or transformations to move from data representing a student's correct or incorrect responses on individual test items to inferences about the form and quantity of...

Applying statistical tools to help understand business processes and make informed business decisions has attracted enormous amount of research interests in recent years. In this dissertation, we develop and apply data mining techniques to two sources of data, online bidding data for eBay and...