School absenteeism (or truancy) may be a signal of an ongoing process of student attrition that eventually leads to early school leaving. This paper estimates by a duration model the influence of school absenteeism on the risk of dropout in secondary education. In particular, using a semiparametric Cox duration model, the timing of the dropout decision of truants is compared with the timing of ...

A statistical model, describing noise-disturbed invariants extracted from a surface patch of a range image, has been developed and applied to region based pose estimation and classification of 3D quadrics. The Mahalanobis distance, which yields the same results as a Baysian classifier, is used for the classification of the surface patches. The results, compared with the Euclidean distance, appe...

We show that maximum a posteriori (MAP) statistical methods can be used in nonparametric machine learning problems in the same way as their current applications in parametric statistical problems, and give some examples of applications. This MAPN (MAP for nonparametric machine learning) paradigm can also reproduce much more transparently the same results as regularization methods in machine lea...

A common approach for the determination of Slow Crack Growth (SCG) parameters are the static and dynamic loading method. Since materials with small Weibull module show a large variability in strength, a correct statistical analysis of the data is indispensable. In this work we propose the use of the Maximum Likelihood method and a Baysian analysis, which, in contrast to the standard procedures,...

Sequential Baysian filtering arises in many practical problems. The complexity of this problem depends very much on the underlying mathematical model. When a linear Gaussian model is assumed, the well known Kalman filter provides the desired optimal solution. However, in many situations these assumptions do not hold, even approximately. We consider here a somewhat simplified version of the gene...

In the feature space clustering approach to image segmentation, each cluster corresponds to a region in the image. Determination of the appropriate number of clusters (regions) has long been an open problem. In this paper, we apply the Baysian-Kullback Ying Yang (BKYY) Model Selection Criterian on this feature space clustering problem to give an appropriate number of regions in image segmentati...

We consider the problem of minimizing the total cost to run a sequence of n tasks in the given order by k agents under the positional cost model. The cost to run a task not only depends on the intrinsic cost of the task itself, but also monotonically related to the position this task is in the working list of the agent assigned. Such a positional effect can naturally arise from the classic sum-...

LDA, short for Latent Dirichlet Allocation, is a hierarchical Bayesian model for content analysis. LDA has seen a wide variety of applications, but it also presents computational challenges because the iterative computation of approximate inference is required. Recently an approach based on Gibbs Sampling and MPI is proposed to address these challenges, while this report presents the work that ...