Will international wars where energy resources play a central role continue to hold sway over life and death for industrialized nations, or is this a transient phase in the evolution of industrial societies? This book answers this question by tracing the history of energy and conflict from...

A systematic way of selecting hyperparameters of the prior on the shape parameter of the generalized extreme value distribution (GEVD) is presented. The optimal selection is based on a Monte Carlo simulation in the generalized maximum likelihood estimation (GMLE) framework. A scaled total misfit...

In regression models with multiplicative error, estimation is often based on either the log-normal or the gamma model. It is well known that the gamma model with constant coefficient of variation and the log-normal model with constant variance give almost the same analysis. This article focuses...

In this paper, the exact form of Fisher information matrix for a four-parameter kappa distribution (K4D) is determined. The K4D is so general that includes a variety of distributions as special cases. The necessary condition for the existence of Fisher information matrix is for k[not equal to]0,...

Fluorescence spectroscopy has emerged in recent years as an effective way to detect cervical cancer. Investigation of the data preprocessing stage uncovered a need for a robust smoothing to extract the signal from the noise. Various robust smoothing methods for estimating fluorescence emission...

Bounds for even moments of sums of strong mixing random variables are given which extend existing bounds. The method of proof uses simple facts about strong mixing random variables and combinatorial methods. The bound is particularly useful for triangular arrays with entries decreasing in size....

Medical decision makers would like to use decision theory to determine optimal treatment strategies for patients, but it can be very difficult to specify loss functions in the medical setting, especially when trying to assign monetary value to health outcomes. These issues led to the development...

This dissertation is aiming to find out the impact of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act on insurance companies' survival. The events of interest are bankruptcy and acquisition, which are correlated and censor each other. A statistical survival analysis method is developed first and then applied to the...