Shannon entropy is increasingly used in many applications. In this article, an estimator of the entropy of a continuous random variable is proposed. Consistency and scale invariance of variance and mean squared error of the proposed estimator is proved and then comparisons are made with Vasicek's (1976), van Es (1992), Ebrahimi et al. (1994) and Correa (1995) entropy estimators. A simulation st...

Equality of residual variances across groups is one of the necessary conditions of measurement invariance. The main argument for not applying this restriction in the analysis of empirical data is that unequal residual variances across groups are differences in reliability of the observed variables rather than a violation of measurement invariance. A power study is carried out to investigate the...

Immigrants gaining economic security tend to reinforce—not relinquish—their ethnic identification [Halter M. Shopping for identity: the marketing of ethnicity. New York: Schoken Books, 2000. p. 256.]. Shopping is one avenue where people affirm themselves. Mall shopping has become an expression of personal values. In this research, the authors investigate shopping values [J. Consum. Res. 20 (199...

To understand the influence of culture on ethical attitudes, a variety of countries must be compared simultaneously to avoid confounding of cultural dimensions. This study uses data from the World Values Survey to develop a measure of ethical attitudes that shows partial measurement invariance across 44 countries. Regressing the resulting latent means on four cultural dimensions [Hofstede G. Cu...

This special issue of The European Journal of Control is dedicated to some of the results of the European Community Esprit LTR Project VHS Veri cation of Hybrid Systems It consists of papers dealing with various aspects of one of the case studies treated in the project the Experimental Batch Plant at the university of Dortmund Before presenting the papers themselves it is worthwhile to say some...

This study investigated the factor structure and measurement invariance of the Mroczek and Kolarz’s scales of positive and negative affect in Iran (N = 2,391) and the USA (N = 2,154), and across gender groups. The two-factor model of affect was supported across the groups. The results of measurement invariance testing confirmed full metric and partial scalar invariance of the scales across cult...

We prove a new combinatorial characterization of polynomial learnability from equiva lence queries and state some of its consequences relating the learnability of a class with the learnability via equivalence and membership queries of its subclasses obtained by restricting the instance space Then we propose and study two models of query learning in which there is a probability distribution on t...

Although previous research has examined cross-cultural differences in personality, many of these studies neglected to first establish that the measures being used were equivalent in meaning across cultures. Using samples of Chinese, Greek, and American respondents, the measurement equivalence of the Big Five Mini-Markers [Saucier, G. (1994). Mini-markers: A brief version of Goldberg’s unipolar ...

This study investigated the factor structure and measurement invariance of the Mroczek and Kolarz’s scales of positive and negative affect in Iran (N = 2,391) and the USA (N = 2,154), and across gender groups. The two-factor model of affect was supported across the groups. The results of measurement invariance testing confirmed full metric and partial scalar invariance of the scales across cult...