OBJECTIVES Chinese county hospitals have been excessively enlarging their scale during the healthcare reform since 2009. The purpose of this paper is to examine the technical efficiency and productivity of county hospitals during the reform process, and to determine whether, and how, efficiency is affected by various factors. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS 114 sample county hospitals were selected ...

This paper considers the censored regression model under the assumption that the regressors are integrated. We show that Maximum Likelihood estimation is superconsistent and asymptotically mixed normal, implying that standard inference techniques remain valid, and that in general least squares estimation based on the positive observations only is superconsistent, but not mixed normal. An except...

Abstract We propose a variational inference-based framework for training Gaussian process regression model subject to censored observational data. Data censoring is typical problem encountered during the data gathering procedure and requires specialized techniques perform inference since resulting probabilistic models are typically analytically intractable. In this article we exploit sparse ind...

During the last years, there was rapid development in the world port industry which is considered to have resulted from the increase of universal trade. The key to the development of each port is its adaptability to the earliest developments and its resistance to the increasing competition. The influence zones of each port are characterised by instability, while each port authority aims at the ...

The rapid development and widespread application of Internet has provided a platform for people to participate and discuss social hotspot events. In the meantime, emergency events have attained more attention and have been spread more quickly than they did ever before by this way. However, the public opinion on Internet usually exerts a heavy impact on the development of emergency events as wel...

We introduce a long-memory dynamic Tobit model, defining it as a censored version of a fractionally-integrated Gaussian ARMA model, which may include seasonal components and/or additional regression variables. Parameter estimation for such a model using standard techniques is typically infeasible, since the model is not Markovian, cannot be expressed in a finite-dimensional state-space form, an...