This study examined whether the relationship between high poverty and infant mortality rates (IMRs) varied across race- and ethnic-specific populations in large urban areas. Data were drawn from 1990 Census and 1992-1994 Vital Statistics for selected U.S. metropolitan areas. High-poverty areas were defined as neighborhoods in which > or = 40% of the families had incomes below the federal povert...

Literature of productive efficiency analysis is currently divided between two main paradigms: the parametric Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) and the deterministic, nonparametric Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). This paper develops a new encompassing framework that melds the SFA-style stochastic composite error term to the DEA-type nonparametric frontier that satisfies monotonicity and concav...

We propose a flexible and multi-scale method for organizing, visualizing, and understanding datasets sampled from or near stratified spaces. The first part of the algorithm produces a cover tree using adaptive thresholds based on a combination of multiscale local principal component analysis and topological data analysis. The resulting cover tree nodes consist of points within or near the same ...