Variable importance measures for random forests have been receiving increased attention as a means of variable selection in many classification tasks in bioinformatics and related scientific fields, for instance to select a subset of genetic markers relevant for the prediction of a certain...

The assessment of the performance of learners by means of benchmark experiments is established exercise. In practice, benchmark studies are a tool to compare the performance of several competing algorithms for a certain learning problem. Cross-validation or resampling techniques are commonly...

Reproducibility of economic research has attracted considerable attention in recentyears. So far, the discussion has focused on reproducibility of empirical analyses. Thispaper addresses a further aspect of reproducibility, the reproducibility of computationalexperiments. We examine the current...

The capabilities of the package exams for automatic generation of (statistical) exams in R are extended by adding support for learning management systems: As in earlier versions of the package exam generation is still based on separate Sweave files for each exercise - but rather than just...

Structured additive regression (STAR) models provide a flexible framework for modeling possible nonlinear effects of covariates: They contain the well established frameworks of generalized linear models (GLM) and generalized additive models (GAM) as special cases but also allow a wider class of...

Researchers are often interested in testing for measurement invariance with respect to an ordinal auxiliary variable such as age group, income class, or school grade. In a factor-analytic context, these tests are traditionally carried out via a likelihood ratio test statistic comparing a model...

Forecasting wind power is an important part of a successful integration of wind power into the power grid. Forecasts with lead times longer than 6 hours are generally made by using statistical methods to postprocess forecasts from numerical weather prediction systems. Two major problems that...

This paper uses model-based recursive partitioning to study economic growth in the 255 European Union NUTS2 regions over the period 1995-2005. The starting point of the analysis is a human-capital augmented Solow-type growth equation similar in spirit to Mankiw, Romer, and Weil (1992). Initial...

Myopic loss aversion (MLA) has been found to play a persistent role for investment behavior under risk. We study whether MLA is already present during adolescence. Quite surprisingly, we find no evidence of MLA in a sample of 755 adolescents. This finding is at odds with previous findings, and...

Four years after the last European football championship (EURO) in Austria and Switzerland, the two finalists of the EURO 2008 - Spain and Germany - are again the clear favorites for the EURO 2012 in Poland and the Ukraine. Using a bookmaker consensus rating - obtained by aggregating winning...