We propose a Bayesian procedure to estimate heteroscedastic variances of the regression error term ƒÖ, when the form of heteroscedasticity is unknown. The prior information on ƒÖ is elicited from the wellknown Eicker-White Heteroscedasticity Consistent Variance-Covariance Matrix Estimator....

We propose a Bayesian procedure to estimate heteroscedastic variances of the regression error term ω, when the form of heteroscedasticity is unknown. The prior information on ω is based on a Dirichlet distribution, and in the Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling, its proposal density...

Item Response Theory (IRT) models are the basis of modern educational measurement. In order to increase testing efficiency, modern tests make ample use of groups of questions associated with a single stimulus (testlets). This violates the IRT assumption of local independence. However, a set of...

The main objective of this PhD was to further develop Bayesian spatio-temporal models (specifically the Conditional Autoregressive (CAR) class of models), for the analysis of sparse disease outcomes such as birth defects. The motivation for the thesis arose from problems encountered when...

Wind power generation is essential to reduce the use of fossil resources and, consequently, the emission of greenhouse gases (GHG). Currently, the National Interconnected System (SIN) has about 9971 wind turbines in operation, the sixth largest network in the world ranking, and 80% of Brazilian...

Modeling real estate prices in the context of hedonic models often involves fitting a Generalized Additive Model, where only the mean of a (lognormal) distribution is regressed on a set of variables without taking other parameters of the distribution into account. Thus far, the application of...