A purposive sample of South African specialist surgeons was used to nonparametrically estimate production relations for single ouptut and multiple output production processes. The analysis was further extended to incorporate parametric assumptions associated with stochastic frontier analysis to...

This paper evaluates the forecast performance of boosting, a variable selection device, and compares it with the forecast combination schemes and dynamic factor models presented in Stock and Watson (2006). Using the same data set and comparison methodology, we find that boosting is a serious...

The association between prices and yields are of paramount importance to the crop insurance programs. Proper estimation of the association is highly desirable. Copulas are one such method to measure the dependence structure. Five single parametric copulas, a non- parametric copula and their...

Reliable knowledge of the spatio-temporal distribution of solar radiation is required for the informed design and deployment planning of solar energy delivery systems. In this paper an improved global solar radiation map for Zimbabwe is developed by merging ground-measured radiation data from a...

We investigate the time-varying ARCH (tvARCH) process. It is shown that it can be used to describe the slow decay of the sample autocorrelations of the squared returns often observed in financial time series, which warrants the further study of parameter estimation methods for the model. Since...

Implementing energy conservation measures in buildings can reduce energy costs and environmental impacts, but such measures cost money to implement so intelligent investment strategies require the ability to quantify the energy savings by comparing actual energy used to how much energy would...

Our goal is to predict a scalar value or a group membership from the discretized observation of curves with sharp local features that might vary both vertically and horizontally. To this aim, we propose to combine the use of the nonparametric functional regression estimator developed by Ferraty...

In this study, a more general single-index regression model was presented to characterize the relationship between a dichotomous response and covariates of interest. With M-phase (M≥2) case-control data supplemented by information on a response and certain covariates, we propose a pseudo...

The paper addresses the issue of choice of bandwidth in the application of semiparametric estimation of the long memory parameter in a univariate time series process. The focus is on the properties of forecasts from the long memory model. A variety of cross-validation methods based on out of...

In this paper we propose an asymptotically equivalent single-step alternative to the two-step partially linear model estimator in Robinson (1988). The estimator not only has the potential to decrease computing time dramatically, it shows substantial finite sample gains in Monte Carlo simulations.