This paper develops a framework based on convex optimization and economic ideas to formulate and solve by an index policy the problem of optimal dynamic effort allocation to a generic discrete-state restless bandit (i.e. binary-action: work/rest) project, elucidating a host of issues raised by...

Since the seminal paper by Dickey and Fuller in 1979, unit-root tests have conditioned the standard approaches to analyse time series with strong serial dependence, the focus being placed in the detection of eventual unit roots in an autorregresive model fitted to the series. In this paper we...

This work assumes that the small area quantities of interest follow a Fay-Herriot model with spatially correlated random area effects. Under this model, parametric and nonparametric bootstrap procedures are proposed for estimating the mean squared error of the EBLUP (Empirical Best Linear...

A popular approach for classifying functional data is based on the distances from the function or its derivatives to group representative (usually the mean) functions or their derivatives. In this paper, we propose using a combination of those distances. Simulation studies show that our...

Earlier researchers have studied some aspects of the classes of distribution functions with decreasing ?-percentile residual life (DPRL(?)), 0 ? 1. The purpose of this paper is to note some further properties of these classes, and to initiate a theory of nonparametric statistical estimation of...

This paper designs, evaluates, and tests a tractable priority-index policy for scheduling target updates in a discrete-time multitarget tracking model, which aims to be close to optimal relative to a discounted or average performance objective accounting for tracking-error variance and...

This paper looks at projections for the Spanish population by sex and age for the period of 2005 to 2050. These were carried out using forecasts for birth and mortality rates, and migration. These rates are calculated using two main sources of information. First, a multivariate time series model...

A modeling approach to treat noisy engineering systems is presented. We deal with controlled systems that evolve in a continuous-time over finite time intervals, but also in continuous interaction with environments of intrinsic variability. We face the complexity of these systems by introducing...

In this paper we study a family of stochastic orders of random variables defined via the comparison of their percentile residual life functions. Some interpretations of these stochastic orders are given, and various properties of them are derived. The relationships to other stochastic orders are...

The widely used Support Vector Machine (SVM) method has shown to yield very good results in Supervised Classification problems. Other methods such as Classification Trees have become more popular among practitioners than SVM thanks to their interpretability, which is an important issue in Data...