Public debt developments in the CEE countries (by A. Miklaszewicz; pp. 1-4) Keywords public debt, sustainability, CEE Countries covered CEE Topics Macroeconomic Analysis, Forecasts and Policy China's quest for oil abroad between state and market (by W. Urban; pp. 5-11) Keywords oil supply and...

The enlargement of the child and juvenile neglect has become one of the key social challenges. There are two million of the neglected or homeless children in Russia. This problem is also observed in the Vologda Oblast: over 2001-2004 a number of such children has critically grown from 240 to...

We propose to estimate the parameters of the Market Share Attraction Model (Cooper & Nakanishi, 1988; Fok & Franses, 2004) in a novel way by using a non-parametric technique for function estimation called Support Vector Regressions (SVR) (Vapnik, 1995; Smola, 1996). Traditionally, the parameters of the...

Several instance-based large-margin classi¯ers have recently been put forward in the literature: Support Hyperplanes, Nearest Convex Hull classifier, and Soft Nearest Neighbor. We examine those techniques from a common fit-versus-complexity framework and study the links be- tween them....

A new classification method is proposed, called Support Hy- perplanes (SHs). To solve the binary classification task, SHs consider the set of all hyperplanes that do not make classification mistakes, referred to as semi-consistent hyperplanes. A test object is classified using that...

Marketing problems often involve inary classification of customers into ``buyers'' versus ``non-buyers'' or ``prefers brand A'' versus ``prefers brand B''. These cases require binary classification models such as logistic regression, linear, and quadratic discriminant analysis. A promising...

To minimize the primal support vector machine (SVM) problem, we propose to use iterative majorization. To do so, we propose to use it- erative majorization. To allow for nonlinearity of the predictors, we use (non)monotone spline transformations. An advantage over the usual ker- nel approach in...

Support vector machines (SVM) are becoming increasingly popular for the prediction of a binary dependent variable. SVMs perform very well with respect to competing techniques. Often, the solution of an SVM is obtained by switching to the dual. In this paper, we stick to the primal support vector...