This paper surveys recent developments in the evaluation of point forecasts. Taking West’s (2006) survey as a starting point, we brie‡y cover the state of the literature as of the time of West’s writing. We then focus on recent developments, including advancements in the evaluation of forecasts at the population level (based on true, unknown model coe¢ cients), the evaluation of forecasts in th...

A family is described in which four subjects in two sibships had typical split hand/foot malformation. The possibility of the existence of a rare autosomal recessive form of the malformation is discussed, as well as a two locus model. In the two locus model the dominant mutation leading to the split hand/foot malformation is controlled by a gene at another locus. A dominant mutation at the cont...

We derive from a structured population model a system of delay differential equations describing the interaction of five subpopulations, namely susceptible and infected adult and juvenile reservoirs and infected adult vectors, for a vector borne disease with particular reference to West Nile virus, and we also incorporate spatial movements by considering the analogue reactiondiffusion systems w...

Modeling with flexible models, such as neural networks, requires careful control of the model complexity and generalization ability of the resulting model. Whereas general asymptotic estimators of generalization ability have been developed over recent years (e.g., [9]), it is widely acknowledged that in most modeling scenarios there isn't sufficient data available to reliably use these estimato...

Forest products value chains (FPVC) are complex networks of units incorporating different goals and beliefs. These units need to work together to generate the different elements of value. To study these value chains, a common representation and understanding of the different components of a value chain must be obtained. This will permit the evaluation of forest and industry strategies, supply c...

Split-merge moves are a standard component of MCMC algorithms for tasks such as multitarget tracking and fitting mixture models with unknown numbers of components. Achieving rapid mixing for split-merge MCMC has been notoriously difficult, and state-of-the-art methods do not scale well. We explore the reasons for this and propose a new split-merge kernel consisting of two sub-kernels: one combi...

Major revolts have recently erupted in parts of the Middle East with substantial international repercussions. Predicting, coping with and winning those revolts have become a grave problem for many regimes and for world powers. We propose a new model of such revolts that describes their evolution by building on the classic Lanchester theory of combat. The model accounts for the split in the popu...

We consider a spiked population model, proposed by Johnstone, whose population eigenvalues are all unit except for a few fixed eigenvalues. The question is to determine how the sample eigenvalues depend on the non-unit population ones when both sample size and population size become large. This paper completely determines the almost sure limits for a general class of samples.