Meyer (1987) extended the theory of mean-variance criterion to include the comparison among distributions that differ only by location and scale parameters and to include general utility functions with only convexity or concavity restrictions. In this paper, we make some comments on Meyer’s paper and extend the results from Tobin (1958) that the indifference curve is convex upwards for risk ave...

This study exploits the sibling structure of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data to measure the degree to which family background explains the variance in the propensity to engage in criminal activities and in the intensity and success of crime participation as measured by the level of criminal earnings. A multiple-equation model whose reduced form disturbances are connected by a com...

It has become widely accepted that correlations between variables measured with the same method, usually self-report surveys, are inflated due to the action of common method variance (CMV), despite a number of sources that suggest the problem is overstated. The author argues that the popular position suggesting CMV automatically affects variables measured with the same method is a distortion an...

The current study builds upon a previous study, which examined the degree to which the lexical properties of students’ essays could predict their vocabulary scores. We expand on this previous research by incorporating new natural language processing indices related to both the surfaceand discourse-levels of students’ essays. Additionally, we investigate the degree to which these NLP indices can...

Human personality and behavior genetic studies have resulted in a growing consensus that five heritable factors account for most variance in human personality. Prior research showed that chimpanzee personality is composed of a dominance-related factor and five human-like factors--Surgency, Dependability, Emotional Stability, Agreeableness, and Openness. Genetic, shared zoo, and nonshared enviro...

Y chromosomal STRs show sufficient variability among individduals in a population and a high degree of geographical differentiation, such that their polymorphic character makes them especially suited for population genetic studies. To investígate the polymorphism of a set of 17 Y-STR loci in northern China, we genotyped the 17 Y chromosomal STR loci in a population sample of 377 unrelated males...

The bias-variance decomposition of error provides useful insights into the error performance of a classifier as it is applied to different types of learning task. Most notably, it has been used to explain the extraordinary effectiveness of ensemble learning techniques. It is important that the research community have effective tools for assessing such explanations. To this end, techniques have ...

We study the problem of empirical minimization for variance-type functionals over functional classes. Sharp non-asymptotic bounds excess variance are derived under mild conditions. In particular, it is shown that some restrictions imposed on class fast convergence rates can be achieved including optimal non-parametric expressive classes in non-Donsker regime additional assumptions. Our main app...

I consider how structure is derived from texture containing changes in orientation over space, and propose that multi-local orientation variance (the average orientation variance across a series of discrete images locales) is an estimate of the degree of organization that is useful both for spatial scale selection and for discriminating structure from noise. The oriented textures used in this p...

BACKGROUND Normalization of surface electromyography (EMG) is a common and recommended practice, however this methodological step itself introduces variability to a data set. Quantification of this variance is necessary to correctly interpret overall EMG variability. This information is also paramount to identifying experimentally and clinically relevant normalization task(s) which minimize ind...