Forests are biologically diverse systems, representing some of the richest biological areas on Earth. They offer a variety of habitats for plants, animals and micro-organisms. However, forest biodiversity is increasingly threatened as a result of deforestation, fragmentation, climate change and other stressors. Biodiversity is the variation of life forms within a given ecosystem, biome, or on t...

The ETL processes are responsible for the extraction of the data from the external sources, transforming the data in order to satisfy the integration needs and for loading the data into the data warehouse. On the other hand, in the data mining world, there is a special concern on using the metrics for efficient classification algorithms. One of these approaches is the one that uses metrics on p...

We describe heuristics, based upon information theory and statistics, for ranking the interestingness of summaries generated from databases. The tuples in a summary are unique, and therefore, can be considered to be a population described by some probability distribution. The four interestingness measures presented here are based upon common measures of diversity of a population: variance, the ...

Seasonal and spatial variation in soil nematode communities was investigated in a field study conducted on a loessial plain in the northern Negev Desert, Israel. Soil samples from 0- to 50-cm depths were collected seasonally during 2001 under the canopy of Atriplex halimus and Hammada scoparia, and between shrubs (control). Total population abundance ranged from 8 to 887 individuals per 100 g s...

Projection pursuit is an exploratory data-analytic method in multivariate (MV) analysis. It is similar to the well-known principal components analysis (PCA) in that it can be used to nd interesting structure within a MV data set. However, unlike PCA, which nds linear projections of maximum variance, projection pursuit nds linear projections of maximum non-normality, which sometimes is better at...

Temporal changes in the structure of biological communities are one of the factors affecting water quality assessment systems. The aim of our work was to analyze the temporal variability of benthic macroinvertebrates and its consequences for the established streams typology. The data analyzed come from a biomonitoring of streams of the Czech Republic during 2002-2005. Changes of the structure o...

Recent tests of stochastic dominance of several orders, proposed by Linton, Maasoumi and Whang [Linton, O., Maasoumi, E., & Whang, Y. (2005). Consistent testing for stochastic dominance under general sampling schemes.Review of Economic Studies, 72(3), 735–765], are applied to reexamine the equity-premium puzzle. An advantage of this non-parametric approach is that it provides a framework to ass...