A major drawback of epidemiological ecological studies, in which the association between area-level summaries of risk and exposure is used to make inference about individual risk, is the difficulty in characterizing within-area variability in exposure and confounder variables. To avoid ecological bias, samples of individual exposure/confounder data within each area are required. Unfortunately, ...

It is well known that output from climate models cannot be used to force hydrological simulations without some form of preprocessing to remove the existing biases. In principle, statistical bias correction methodologies act on model output so the statistical properties of the corrected data match those of the observations. However, the improvements to the statistical properties of the data are ...

Social influence cannot be identified from purely observational data on social networks, because such influence is generically confounded with latent homophily, i.e., with a node’s network partners being informative about the node’s attributes and therefore its behavior. We show that if the network grows according to either a community (stochastic block) model, or a continuous latent space mode...

In this study we suggest a covariance structure model to estimate intergenerational income correlations. Within this framework we adjust for lifecycle bias which arises when lifetime earnings are approximated by current income. Furthermore, the suggested empirical strategy is immune to the attenuation bias problem of linear models. This is a particularly desirable feature when only small survey...

We propose a theoretical framework allowing a real integration of Machine Learning and Knowledge acquisition. This article shows that the input of a Machine Learning system can be mapped to the model of expertise as it is used in KADS methodology. The notion of learning bias will play a central role. We shall see that parts of it can be identified to what people are used to call the inference a...

The NCAA selects teams for their championship tournaments using a selection committee. For the Men’s Division I NCAA Basketball Tournament the committee must factor in the results of over 5,000 regular season games, as well as other qualitative factors. One of the key summary statistics used by the committee during the process is the Rating Percentage Index (RPI). This paper evaluates the commi...

A generalised minimum variance controller is developed for linear time-varying systems. The plants to be controlled are described using a controlled autoregressive moving average model and are exponentially stable. Both, the plant parameters and the noise variance are time-varying. The generalised minimum variance cost functional is the sum of a tracking error variance between a filtered plant ...

The double intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) problem, in which excessive precipitation is produced in the Southern Hemisphere tropics that resembles a Southern Hemisphere counterpart to the strong Northern Hemisphere ITCZ, is perhaps the most significant and most persistent bias of global climate models. In this study, we look to the extratropics for possible causes of the double ITCZ probl...

Attending college seems to be a profitable and affordable investment in the US. Nevertheless, a number of academically talented young people still hesitate to attend college. This puzzle motivates this paper to test for whether college education is a risky investment. To measure the riskiness of college attendance, I estimate the risk differential in earnings between college attendees and high ...