This collection of papers provides an up to date treatment of item response theory, an important topic in educational testing.

The 5th Workshop on Case Studies in Bayesian Statistics was held at the Carnegie Mellon University campus on September 24-25, 1999. As in the past, the workshop featured both invited and contributed case studies. The former were presented and discussed in detail while the latter were presented in poster format. This volume contains the three invited case studies with the accompanying discussion as well as ten contributed pa pers selected by a refereeing process. The majority of case studies in the volume come from biomedical research. However, the reader will also find studies in education...

The authors, Dominique Ladiray and Benoit Quenneville, provide a unique and comprehensive r view of the X-11 Method of seasonal adjustment. They review the original X-11 Method developed at the US Bureau of the Census in the mid-1960's, the X-ll core of the X-ll-ARTMA Method developed at Statistics Canada in the 1970's, and the X-11 module in the X- 12-ARTMA Method developed more recently at the Bureau of the Census. The review will prove extremely useful to anyone working in the field of seasonal adjustment who wants to understand the X-11 Method and how it fits into the broader picture of...

During the past twenty years spatial statistics has experienced important developments and has been applied in many fields of science. In view of these facts, spatial statistics was an important topic during the theme year on statistics at the CRM (Centre de recherches mathematiques, Universite de Montreeal) in 1997-98. This volume contains 13 papers based on presentations by eminent researchers at four workshops during that year: Statistical Inference for Spatial Processes, Image Analysis, Applications of Spatial Statistics in Earth, Environmental, and Health Sciences, and Statistics of...

Wavelet methods have become a widely spread tool in signal and image process- ing tasks. This book deals with statistical applications, especially wavelet based smoothing. The methods described in this text are examples of non-linear and non- parametric curve fitting. The book aims to contribute to the field both among statis- ticians and in the application oriented world (including but not limited to signals and images). Although it also contains extensive analyses of some existing methods, it has no intention whatsoever to be a complete overview of the field: the text would show too much...

One of the most profound revolutions brought about by quantum mechanics is that it does away with the distinction between waves and particles: atoms, in particular, can exhibit all the properties that we associate with wave phenomena, such as diffraction and interference; it has recently even become possible to prepare collections of atoms in coherent states, like those of photons in a laser beam. These developments are at the core of the rapidly expanding field of atom optics. --Atom Optics gradually leads the reader from elementary concepts to the frontiers of the field. It is organized in...

This book introduces a new representation of probability measures, the lift zonoid representation, and demonstrates its usefulness in statistical applica- tions. The material divides into nine chapters. Chapter 1 exhibits the main idea of the lift zonoid representation and surveys the principal results of later chap- ters without proofs. Chapter 2 provides a thorough investigation into the theory of the lift zonoid. All principal properties of the lift zonoid are col- lected here for later reference. The remaining chapters present applications of the lift zonoid approach to various fields of...

First published in 1202, Fibonacci's Liber Abaci was one of the most important books on mathematics in the Middle Ages, introducing Arabic numerals and methods throughout Europe. Its author, Leonardo Pisano, known today as Fibonacci, was a citizen of Pisa, an active maritime power, with trading outposts on the Barbary Coast and other points in the Muslim Empire. As a youth, Fibonacci was instructed in mathematics in one of these outposts; he continued his study of mathematics while traveling extensively on business and developed contacts with scientists throughout the Mediterranean world. A...

The book is composed of two volumes, each consisting of five chapters. In Vol ume I, following some statistical motivation based on a randomization model, a general theory of the analysis of experiments in block designs has been de veloped. In the present Volume II, the primary aim is to present methods of that satisfy the statistical requirements described in constructing block designs Volume I, particularly those considered in Chapters 3 and 4, and also to give some catalogues of plans of the designs. Thus, the constructional aspects are of predominant interest in Volume II, with a general...

The role of the weak convergence technique via weighted empirical processes has proved to be very useful in advancing the development of the asymptotic theory of the so called robust inference procedures corresponding to non-smooth score functions from linear models to nonlinear dynamic models in the 1990's. This monograph is an ex panded version of the monograph Weighted Empiricals and Linear Models, IMS Lecture Notes-Monograph, 21 published in 1992, that includes some aspects of this development. The new inclusions are as follows. Theorems 2. 2. 4 and 2. 2. 5 give an extension of the...