This paper focuses on estimating the number of species and the number of abundant species in a specific geographic region and, consequently, draw inferences on the number of rare species. The word 'species' is generic referring to any objects in a population that can be categorized. In the areas...

For centuries, Alfred the Great was judged to have translated several Latin texts into Old English. Many scholars, however, have expressed doubt whether Alfred could have done all of this work. With the availability of the Old English Corpus in electronic form, it is feasible to subject the...

Configural Frequency Analysis (CFA) asks whether a cell in a cross-classification contains more or fewer cases than expected with respect to some base model. This base model is specified such that cells with more cases than expected (also called types) can be interpreted from a substantive...

A large number of functional forms have been suggested in the literature for estimating Lorenz curves that describe the relationship between income and population shares. One way of choosing a particular functional form is to pick the one that best fits the data in some sense. Another approach,...

In this paper, we examine deterministic and Bayesian methods for analyzing finite Dirichlet mixtures. The deterministic method is based on the likelihood approach, and the Bayesian approach is implemented using the Gibbs sampler. The selection of the number of clusters for both approaches is...

We propose a parametric model based on the Poisson distribution that permits to take into account both unobserved worker and workplace heterogeneity as long as both effects are nested. By assuming that workplace and worker unobserved heterogeneity components follow a gamma and a Dirichlet...

Abstract Public policy relies strongly upon expert opinion, especially in risk assessment for rare events. But expert opinion is often inconsistent, both within and between experts. We therefore develop a statistical model for the elicited opinions, and use that to borrow strength across the...

This paper addresses the task of eliciting an informative prior distribution for multinomial models. We first introduce a method of eliciting univariate beta distributions for the probability of each category, conditional on the probabilities of other categories. Two different forms of...

We present a multistage stochastic procedure that produces a fair allocation of a cake among n-person. In each step players observe the collection of the random offers (x1, …, xn), where x1 + ⋯ + xn = 1. As the proposal emerged players have to make a decision to accept it or reject it. The...