Scanner data for fast moving consumer goods typically amount to panels of time series where both N and T are large. To reduce the number of parameters and to shrink parameters towards plausible and interpretable values, multi-level models turn out to be useful. Such models contain in the second...

A sensible Bayesian model selection or comparison strategy implies selecting the model with the highest posterior probability. While some improper priors have attractive properties such as, e.g., low frequentist risk, it is generally claimed that Bartlett's paradox implies that using improper...

A popular functional form for modeling the consumption block of a computable general equilibrium model (CGE) is the Linear Expenditure System (LES) for which the Engel curves are straight lines. To allow for more general shapes two other systems have been proposed in recent literature: An...

In this paper we investigate the complexity of the economic lot-sizing problem with remanufacturing (ELSR) options. Whereas in the classical economic lot-sizing problem demand can only be satisfied by production, in the ELSR problem demand can also be satisfied by remanufacturing returned items....

Ports provide jetty facilities for ships to load and unload their cargo. Jetty capacity is costly and therefore limited, causing delays for arriving ships. However, ship delays are also costly, so terminal operators attempt to minimize their number and duration. Here, simulation has proved to be...

To study the block structure of a connected graph G=(V,E), we introduce two algebraic approaches that reflect this structure: a binary operation + called a leap operation and a ternary relation L called a leap system, both on a finite, nonempty set V. These algebraic structures are easily...

We examine the size properties of tests for causality in variance in the presence of structural breaks in volatility. Extensive Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate that these tests suffer from severe size distortions when such breaks are not taken into account. Pre-testing the series for...

In this article we give an overview of the literature on multi-component maintenance optimization. We focus on work appearing since the 1991 survey "A survey of maintenance models for multi-unit systems" by Cho and Parlar. This paper builds forth on the review article by Dekker et al. (1996),...

Multidimensional scaling is a statistical technique to visualize dissimilarity data. In multidimensional scaling, objects are represented as points in a usually two dimensional space, such that the distances between the points match the observed dissimilarities as closely as possible. Here, we...

We propose a novel statistic to test the rank of a matrix. The rank statistic overcomes deficiencies of existing rank statistics, like: necessity of a Kronecker covariance matrix for the canonical correlation rank statistic of Anderson (1951), sensitivity to the ordering of the variables for the...