Most bank efficiency studies that use stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) employ each bank’s own implicit input price when estimating efficient frontiers. But the theoretical foundation of most studies is a cost minimisation and/ or profit maximisation problem assuming perfect input markets. At the very least, traditional input price proxies therefore contain substantial measurement error. In th...

This paper investigates cost and profit efficiency of German hospitals. More specifically, it deals with the question how hospital efficiency varies with ownership, patient structure, and other exogenous factors, which are neither inputs nor outputs of the production process. We conduct a Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) on a multifaceted administrative German dataset combined with the balanc...

This paper applies parametric and non-parametric and parametric tests to assess the efficiency of electricity distribution companies in Germany. We address traditional issues in electricity sector benchmarking, such as the role of scale effects and optimal utility size, as well as new evidence specific to the situation in Germany This paper applies parametric and non-parametric and parametric t...

To extract motion information, the brain needs to compensate for time delays that are ubiquitous in neural signal transmission and processing. Here we propose a simple yet effective mechanism to implement anticipative tracking in neural systems. The proposed mechanism utilizes the property of spike-frequency adaptation (SFA), a feature widely observed in neuronal responses. We employ continuous...

The effectiveness of coach education programmes has been identified as a key factor in the development of coaches (Gilbert & Trudel, 1999a). There are a number of elements that constitute a measurement of effectiveness, not least of all, how useful the coaches find the information presented to them during coach education courses, if they utilise the content during their execution of the coachin...

Slow Feature Analysis (SFA) is a subspace learning method inspired by the human visual system, however, it is seldom seen in computer vision. Motivated by its application for unsupervised activity analysis, we develop SFA’s first implementation of online temporal video segmentation to detect episodes of motion changes. We utilize a domainspecific indefinite kernel which takes the data represent...

1 Directorate D—Sustainable Resource, Unit D.02 Water and Marine Resources, European Commission Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy, 2 UMR 248 MARBEC, IRD-IREMER-UM-CNRS, Seychelles Fishing Authority (SFA), Victoria, Seychelles, 3 Seychelles Fishing Authority, Mahe, Seychelles, 4 AZTI-Tecnalia, Marine Research Division, Pasaia, Spain, 5 Instituto Español de Oceanografia, Tropical Tuna Fisheries...

This paper investigates cost and profit efficiency of German hospitals. More specifically, it deals with the question how hospital efficiency varies with ownership, patient structure, and other exogenous factors, which are neither inputs nor outputs of the production process. We conduct a Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) on a multifaceted administrative German dataset combined with the balanc...

Nowadays, Internet makes it easy for us to share all kinds of information. However, violent content in web has harmful influence on those who lack proper judgment, especially teenagers. This paper presents an approach for detecting violence in videos, where Discriminative Slow Feature Analysis (D-SFA) is introduced to learn slow feature functions from dense trajectories derived from videos. Aft...

The main objectives of this paper are to measure the technical efficiency levels of Iranian banks and to investigate the degree of factors influence on the efficiency in these banks. Stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) methods are applied to bank-level data over 22 years (from 1995 to 2011). We find that publicly-owned banks obtain average technical efficiencies of 0.73, which is lower than priv...