Surveys are an important tool for researchers. Survey attributes are typically discrete data measured on a Likert scale. Collected responses from the survey contain an enormous amount of data. It is increasingly important to develop powerful means for clustering such data and knowledge extraction that could help in decision-making. The process of clustering becomes complex if the number of surv...

Heterogeneous expectations and tests of efficiency in the yen/dollar forward exchange rate market Abstract This paper examines the efficiency of the forward yen/dollar market using micro survey data. Conventional tests of unbiasedness do not correspond directly to the zero-profit condition. Instead, we use the survey data to calculate potential profits of individual forecasters based on a natur...

INTRODUCTION The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) included accelerometry in the 2003-2006 data collection cycles. Researchers have used these data since their release in 2007, but the data have not been consistently treated, examined, or reported. The objective of this study was to aggregate data from studies using NHANES accelerometry data and to catalogue study decisi...

OBJECTIVES This report details the National Center for Health Statistics' (NCHS) development of the 2006 NCHS Urban-Rural Classification Scheme for Counties and provides some examples of how the scheme can be used to describe differences in health measures by urbanization level. METHODS The 2006 NCHS urban-rural classification scheme classifies all U.S. counties and county-equivalents into si...

The publication of this special section offers a chance to reflect on a topic of perennial interest in psychiatry: the ethics of commenting on public figures. Since at least the election of 1964, when publisher Ralph Ginzburg became concerned about Barry Goldwater’s psychological fitness, psychiatrists have debated the ethics of speaking out about the mental health of public figures. In that ye...

Uncertainty about future spread of invasive organisms hinders planning of effective response measures. We present a two-stage scenario optimization model that accounts for uncertainty about the spread of an invader, and determines survey and eradication strategies that minimize the expected program cost subject to a safety rule for eradication success. The safety rule includes a risk standard f...

Sequential pattern and rule mining have been the focus of much research, however predicting missing sets of elements within a sequence remains a challenge. Recent work in survey design suggests that if these missing elements can be inferred with a higher degree of certainty, it could greatly reduce the time burden on survey participants. To address this problem and the more general problem of m...