We consider the non-nested testing prqblem of non-parametric regressions. We show that, when the regression functions are unknown under both the null and the alternative hypotheses, an extension of the J-test procedure of Davidson and Mackinnon (1981) will lead to a test statistic with well defined asymptotic properties. The derivation of the test statistic involves double kernel estimation. Mo...

Regularization is widely used in statistics and machine learning to prevent overfitting and gear solution towards prior information. In general, a regularized estimation problem minimizes the sum of a loss function and a penalty term. The penalty term is usually weighted by a tuning parameter and encourages certain constraints on the parameters to be estimated. Particular choices of constraints...

We study two Durbin-Watson type tests for serial correlation of errors in regression models when observations are missing. We derive them by applying standard methods used in time series and linear models to deal with missing observations. The first test may be viewed as a regular Durbin-Watson test in the context of an extended model. We discuss appropriate adjustments that allow one to use al...

This paper applies Probabilistic Relational Models (PRMs) to the Collaborative Filtering task, focussing on the EachMovie data set. We first learn a standard PRM, and show that its performance is competitive with the best known techniques. We then define a hierarchical PRM, which extends standard PRMs by dynamically refining classes into hierarchies, which improves the expressiveness as well as...

Model formulas are the standard approach for specifying the variables in statistical models in the S language. Although being eminently useful in an extremely wide class of applications, they have certain limitations including being confined to single responses and not providing convenient support for processing formulas with multiple parts. The latter is relevant for models with two or more se...

Watershed Regressions for Pesticides for multiple pesticides (WARP-MP) are statistical models developed to predict concentration statistics for a wide range of pesticides in unmonitored streams. The WARP-MP models use the national atrazine WARP models in conjunction with an adjustment factor for each additional pesticide. The WARP-MP models perform best for pesticides with application timing an...