FLOSS communities are often described as meritocracies. We consider merit as a social construction that structures the community as a whole by allocating prestige to its participants on the basis of what they do. It implies a hierarchy of the different activities (web maintenance, writing code, bug report...) within the project. We present a study based on the merging of two datasets. We analyz...

The kernel density estimator (KDE) based on a radial positive-semidefinite kernel may be viewed as a sample mean in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. This mean can be viewed as the solution of a least squares problem in that space. Replacing the squared loss with a robust loss yields a robust kernel density estimator (RKDE). Previous work has shown that RKDEs are weighted kernel density estim...

Consistency of the kernel density estimator requires that the kernel bandwidth tends to zero as the sample size grows. In this paper we investigate the question of whether consistency is possible when the bandwidth is fixed, if we consider a more general class of weighted KDEs. To answer this question in the affirmative, we introduce the fixed-bandwidth KDE (fbKDE), obtained by solving a quadra...

Concentrations of four heavy metals (Cr, Cu, Ni, and Zn) were measured at 1,082 sampling sites in Changhua county of central Taiwan. A hazard zone is defined in the study as a place where the content of each heavy metal exceeds the corresponding control standard. This study examines the use of spatial analysis for identifying multiple soil pollution hotspots in the study area. In a preliminary ...

Depolarized dynamic light scattering (DLS), dielectric relaxation (DS), and deuterium NMR studies of fragile van der Waals glass forming liquids phenylphthalein-dimethylether (PDE) and cresolphthalein-dimethylether (KDE) are presented. In PDE a new dielectric loss process was found, which can be attributed to the 180 degrees flip of the phenyl rings. The previous finding that the distribution o...

An approach to mining repositories of web-based user documentation for patterns of evolutionary change in the context of internationalization and localization is presented. Localized web documents that are frequently co-changed (i.e., an evolutionary dependency) during the natural language translation process are uncovered to support the future evolution of the system. A sequential-pattern mini...

AbstractIn this paper, we evaluate the performance of a spatial multiresolution analysis (SMA) method, that behaves like variable bandwidth kernel density estimation (KDE) for hazardous r...

Abstract Mutual Information (MI) is an important dependency measure between random variables, due to its tight connection with information theory. It has numerous applications, both in theory and practice. However, when employed in practice, it is often necessary to estimate the MI from available data. There are several methods to approximate the MI, but arguably one of the simplest and most wi...

In classification, feature selection is an important pre-processing step to simplify the dataset and improve the data representation quality, which makes classifiers become better, easier to train, and understand. Because of an ability to analyse non-linear interactions between features, mutual information has been widely applied to feature selection. Along with counting approaches, a tradition...

Efficient delineation of conservation areas is a great challenge in maintaining biodiversity. Kernel density estimators (KDEs) are a powerful tool in this perspective, but they have not been applied at the population level on patch-distributed organisms. This would be particularly worthy for species that need broad habitats beyond those where they can be sampled; such as terrestrial lands for p...