Quality has become an important source of competitive advantage for the modern company. Therefore, quality control has become one of its key ac tivities. Since the control of existing products and processes only allows moderate quality improvements, the optimal design of new products and processes has become extremely important. This is because the flexibility, which characterizes the design stage, allows the quality to be built in prod ucts and processes. In this way, substantial quality improvements can be achieved. An indispensable technique in the design stage of a product or a process is...

Statistically matching of separate survey samples - can this be efficient? When there is no single source file available about all the information of interest, techniques of matching different data sets are often applied. Then individual respondents on one survey are matched to those on another based on some common characteristics. The respondents in the resulting data set will have all the answers to all the questions in both original surveys. For example, government policy questions as well as media planning tasks may be answered by means of such a statistically matched data set. This book...

This book presents the modern theory of nonparametric goodness-of-fit testing. It fills the gap in modern nonparametric statistical theory by discussing hypothesis testing and addresses mathematical statisticians who are interesting in the theory of non-parametric statistical inference. It will be of interest to specialists who are dealing with applied non-parametric statistical problems relevant in signal detection and transmission and in technical and medical diagnostics among others.

Solitons are a well-known and intriguing aspect of nonlinear behavior in a continuous system such as a fluid: a wave propagates through the medium without distortion. Liquid crystals are highly ordered systems without a rigid, long-range structure. Solitons in liquid crystals (sometimes referred to as "walls") have a wide variety of remarkable properties that are becoming important for practical applications such as electroluminescent display. This book, the first review of the subject to be published, contains not only surveys of the existing literature, but presents new results as well.

Any method of fitting equations to data may be called regression. Such equations are valuable for at least two purposes: making predictions and judging the strength of relationships. Because they provide a way of em pirically identifying how a variable is affected by other variables, regression methods have become essential in a wide range of fields, including the social sciences, engineering, medical research and business. Of the various methods of performing regression, least squares is the most widely used. In fact, linear least squares regression is by far the most widely used of any...

The aim of this book is to make accessible the two important but rare works of Brook Taylor and to describe his role in the history of linear perspective. Taylor's works, Linear Perspective and New Principles on Linear Perspective, are among the most important sources in the history of the theory of perspective. This text focuses on two aspects of this history. The first is the development, starting in the beginning of the 17th century, of a mathematical theory of perspective where gifted mathematicians used their creativity to solve basic problems of perspective and simultaneously were...

Correlated data arise in numerous contexts across a wide spectrum of subject-matter disciplines. Modeling such data present special challenges and opportunities that have received increasing scrutiny by the statistical community in recent years. In October 1996 a group of 210 statisticians and other scientists assembled on the small island of Nantucket, U. S. A., to present and discuss new developments relating to Modelling Longitudinal and Spatially Correlated Data: Methods, Applications, and Future Direc- tions. Its purpose was to provide a cross-disciplinary forum to explore the...

Many important molecular conformation problems, such as protein folding, are expressed as global minimization problems. It is the fact that local minimization is insufficient, that markedly differentiates this volume from the previous two. Unfortunately, global minimization problems that result from models of molecular conformation are usually intractable. For example, simple 1-dimensional versions of distance conformation problems are NP-hard. Nevertheless, there has been significant recent progress in the design of promising heuristic strategies (often involving the use of high- performance...

Monte Carlo methods are numerical methods based on random sampling and quasi-Monte Carlo methods are their deterministic versions. This volume contains the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Monte Carlo and Quasi-Monte Carlo Methods in Scientific Computing which was held at the University of Salzburg (Austria) from July 9--12, 1996. The conference was a forum for recent progress in the theory and the applications of these methods. The topics covered in this volume range from theoretical issues in Monte Carlo and simulation methods, low-discrepancy point sets and...