This paper presents a new analysis of segregation between schools in terms of pupils living in poverty, for all secondary schools in England from 1996 to 2005. This shows that the clustering of similar pupils in specific schools increased noticeably from 1996 to 2001, but then settled at a level still below that of 1989 when official records began. The analysis uses four estimates of segregatio...

The generalized nested logit model is a new member of the generalized extreme value family of models. The GNL provides a higher degree of flexibility in the estimation of substitution or cross-elasticity between pairs of alternatives than previously developed generalized extreme value models. The generalized nested logit model includes the paired combinatorial logit and cross-nested logit model...

In some data envelopment analysis (DEA) applications, some inputs of DMUs have negative values with positive cost. This paper generalizes the global cost Malmquist productivity index to compare the productivity of dierent DMUs with negative inputs in any two periods of times under variable returns to scale (VRS) technology, and then the generalized index is decomposed to several components. The...

Although the “scale-free” literature is large and growing, it gives neither a precise definition of scale-free graphs nor rigorous proofs of many of their claimed properties. In fact, it is easily shown that the existing theory has many inherent contradictions and verifiably false claims. In this paper, we propose a new, mathematically precise, and structural definition of the extent to which a...

We give explanations on the differences between a number of representations that have been proposed in the literature to measure the structural complexity of an object. In particular, we propose the notion of process complexity, the notion of sophistication from a given perspective, the notion of sophisticated depth, and the notion of self-dissimilarity. We also propose the notion of an approxi...

We present aligned hierarchies, a novel solution to the dimension reduction problem, representing high-dimensional and noisy sequential data as a low-dimensional object that encodes relevant information. In this thesis, we motivate our presentation and discussion of aligned hierarchies through the lens of Music Information Retrieval (MIR), constructing aligned hierarchies by finding, encoding, ...

Although the “scale-free” literature is large and growing, it gives neither a precise definition of scale-free graphs nor rigorous proofs of many of their claimed properties. In fact, it is easily shown that the existing theory has many inherent contradictions and verifiably false claims. In this paper, we propose a new, mathematically precise, and structural definition of the extent to which a...

Two methods of evaluation of semantic similarity/dissimilarity of English nouns are proposed based on their modifier sets taken from Oxford Collocation Dictionary for Student of English. The first method measures similarity by the portion of modifiers commonly applicable to both nouns under evaluation. The second method measures dissimilarity by the change of the mean value of cohesion between ...

This work presents an automatic tuning method for the discontinuous component of the Sliding Mode Generalized Predictive Controller (SMGPC) subject to constraints. The strategy employs Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) to minimize a second aggregated cost function. The continuous component is obtained by the standard procedure, by Quadratic Programming (QP), thus yielding an online dual optimiz...

MDF tree is a data structure (index) that is used to speed up similarity searches in huge databases. To achieve its goal the indexes should exploit some property of the dissimilarity measure. MDF indexes assume that the dissimilarity measure can be viewed as a distance in a metric space. Moreover, in this framework is assumed that the distance is computationally very expensive and then, countin...