The geosciences are a highly suitable field of application for optimizing model parameters and experimental designs especially because many data are collected. In this paper, the weighted least squares estimator for optimizing model parameters is presented together with its asymptotic properties. A popular approach to optimize experimental designs called local optimal experimental designs is de...

The methods of science, with all its imperfections, can be used to improve social, political and economic systems, and this is, I think, true no matter what criterion of improvement is adopted. How is this possible if science is based on experiment? Humans are not electrons or laboratory rats. But every act of Congress, every Supreme Court decision, every Presidential National Security Directiv...

Maximizing data information requires careful selection, termed design, of the points at which data are observed. Experimental design is reviewed here for broad classes of data collection and analysis problems, including: fractioning techniques based on orthogonal arrays, Latin hypercube designs and their variants for computer experimentation, efficient design for data mining and machine learnin...

An image is never noise free. Visual inspection of a part from its image is therefore affected by image errors. Understanding how image errors affect measurement precision is therefore critical for accurate inspection. In this paper, we lay out a statistical framework that allows to explicitly handle image errors and characterize their impact on measurement precision. A hierarchical model is al...

Economic theory provides a great deal of information about demand models. Specifically, theory can dictate many relationships that expenditure and price elasticities should fulfill. Unfortunately, analysts cannot be certain whether these relationships will hold exactly. Many analysts perform hypothesis tests to determine if the theory is correct. If the theory is accepted then the relationships...

Seeding influential social network members is crucial for the success of a viral marketing campaign and product diffusion. In line with the assumption that connections between customers in social networks are binary (either present or absent), previous research has generally recommended seeding network members who are well-connected. However, the importance of connections between customers vari...