The issue of measurement invariance commonly arises in factor-analytic contexts, with methods for assessment including likelihood ratio tests, Lagrange multiplier tests, and Wald tests. These tests all require advance definition of the number of groups, group membership, and offending model...

To assess the effects of the EMU on inflation rate dynamics of its member states, the inflation rate series for 21 European countries are investigated for structural changes. To capture changes in mean, variance, and skewness of inflation rates, a generalized logistic model is adopted and...

Near real-time monitoring of ecosystem disturbances is critical for addressing impacts on carbon dynamics, biodiversity, and socio-ecological processes. Satellite remote sensing enables cost-effective and accurate monitoring at frequent time steps over large areas. Yet, generic methods to detect...

Differential item functioning (DIF) can lead to an unfair advantage or disadvantage for certain subgroups in educational and psychological testing. Therefore, a variety of statistical methods has been suggested for detecting DIF in the Rasch model. Most of these methods are designed for the...

Beta regression - an increasingly popular approach for modeling rates and proportions - is extended in various directions: (a) bias correction/reduction of the maximum likelihood estimator, (b) beta regression tree models by means of recursive partitioning, (c) latent class beta regression by...

It is popular belief that the weather is bad more frequently on weekends than on other days of the week and this is often perceived to be associated with an increased chance of rain. In fact, the meteorological literature does report some evidence for such human-induced weekly cycles although...

Commonly used classification and regression tree methods like the CART algorithm are recursive partitioning methods that build the model in a forward stepwise search. Although this approach is known to be an efficient heuristic, the results of recursive tree methods are only locally optimal, as...