The technical and allocative efficiency of broadacre farmers in a southern region of Western Australia is investigated over a three-year period. Applying data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) reveals there is some inefficiency in each year, which decreases over time. The distributions of technical efficiency in each year are positively skewed toward higher effic...

Policy makers are increasingly seeking to develop overall measures of the efficiency of public service organisations. To that end, the use ‘off-the-shelf’ statistical tools such as data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) have been advocated as tools to measure organisational efficiency. The analytical sophistication of such methods has reached an advanced stage of...

A bounding region for spiral curve segments shaped by two circular arcs, parts of the osculating circles at the spiral’s endpoints, and two lines is introduced. This bounding region, denoted Spiral Fat Arc (SFA) is simple to construct and process, and shows a cubic approximation order to a given spiral curve. Given a general planar parametric curve, it can be split at curvature extrema (and inf...

The relationship of nanocomposite dispersion to dispersion techniques and other processing parameters was studied. Examining all permutations of the various factors in the laboratory is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose to map a correlation between inputs and output via a self-adaptive scattered data approximation method. The proposed greedy algorithm, sequential function approximat...

Almost all climate time series have some degree of nonstationarity due to external driving forces perturbing the observed system. Therefore, these external driving forces should be taken into account when constructing the climate dynamics. This paper presents a new technique of obtaining the driving forces of a time series from the slow feature analysis (SFA) approach, and then introduces them ...